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Feb 08
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934: Building Confidence by Facing Fears with Michelle Poler

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Michelle Poler shares her epic story and strategies for facing fears head-on.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to instantly flip your fear perspective
  2. Why to dare being disliked
  3. The distinction between being brave versus fearless

About Michelle

As the Founder of Hello Fears, Michelle Poler has created a social movement empowering millions to step outside of their comfort zone and tap into their full potential. She has inspired some of the world’s most influential organizations including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many more. Poler is also the creator of the project 100 Days Without Fear and her work has been featured on CBS, CNN and Buzzfeed, among many others. 

Resources Mentioned

Michelle Poler Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Michelle, welcome.

Michelle Poler

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear so much of your story and your pro tips. Could you kick us off by giving us the whole scoop on the 100 Days Without Fear project?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, where should I start? This is 2015, I moved to New York to do a Master’s in Branding at the School of Visual Arts, and I realized that I was not living life to the fullest, that I was living inside of my comfort zone. And, suddenly, at the Master’s that I was doing, they asked us to do a 100-day project of our choice. And while a lot of the students kind of picked a project that could fit their lifestyle, I adopted my lifestyle to the project when I decided that I was going to go outside of my comfort zone for 100 days in a row. Basically, I faced one fear a day.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, lay it on us, so what was the first fear you tackled? And what was the most dramatic? Can we hear a few tales on the frontlines?

Michelle Poler

So, the first fear was to actually accept this project, to say yes to facing my fears. I spent my entire life living inside of my comfort zone, so it was like 26 years saying no to things that made me uncomfortable, and, suddenly, saying yes to all of them at the same time, so that was really scary, just saying yes to this project, committing to changing my life from one day to the other. So, that was the first fear.

And then I started slowly taking risks, doing things that are outside of my comfort zone, but that are not too risky or dangerous. For example, fear number two was, I think, eating an oyster, something I avoided for a really long time. Fear number three was getting a piercing in my ear. Like, those small things that I avoided for 26 years, and, suddenly, I’m like, “Let’s do this. I’ve been thinking about this for so long, but I didn’t have the courage. Now, I’m going to try it out.”

And then, little by little, I started, like, escalating on the level of, I guess, I don’t know, the fears that I was facing, until the project went viral around day 40. And then, even though I got a lot of love and new followers, and people being very inspired to go after their own fears, I also got criticism, as you could imagine, and people saying things like, “You’re doing things that I do on my day-to-day life.”

I was doing things like getting a Brazilian wax, or driving at night, or flying by myself, eating by myself in a restaurant, doing all these things that I just avoided for a long time. And I was like, “This is my time to step it up,” and that’s when I started facing bigger fears, doing things like skydiving, posing nude for an art class, holding a tarantula or a snake, doing standup comedy, things that people don’t do on their day-to-day.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, there’s so much in there right there, and it’s unfortunate when you hear the haters, or the critiques, because that’s sort of the whole idea, like, “Yeah, they were my fears, not yours.”

Michelle Poler
Yeah, it’s very personal.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, all us probably have some fears that it seems like “normal people,” or everybody else is just fine with. I’m thinking about maybe there’s some, like, home improvement projects, like, “I don’t know if I really want to get down and dirty with, like, the saw, and the drywall.” And it’s like, “Oh, it’s no problem.”

And so, I think that’s dead-on. It’s sort of unique for each individual, and so maybe there’s an implication right there. It’s like who are you going to share this with? Some folks will support you, and some folks will just do the opposite.

Michelle Poler

That’s why people hide their fears because they’re afraid to be judged, I guess, and say, “Am I the only one afraid of this?” And then that’s why I think the project went viral because I was, I guess, brave enough to be very vocal about my own fears, even though they’re like super simple, some of them, but still scary to me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, could you paint a picture for us for one particular that was pretty hard, and what the scene was like, and what you were feeling, and how it unfolded?

Michelle Poler

Well, so many come to my mind, it’s so hard to choose one. But let’s talk about posing nude in front of an art class…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, let’s.

Michelle Poler

…which was really scary.

Pete Mockaitis

Lay it on us.

Michelle Poler

First of all, I didn’t come up with that fear. A friend of mine suggested that fear. Actually, I only came up with 20 fears. The rest, like all the other 80 fears, people suggested to me, and those that I can relate to, and I was like, “Yes, that is definitely outside of my comfort zone I would tackle.”

So, a friend suggested this, and she’s like, “Why don’t you pose nude for an art class?” And I’m like, “Why did you put that idea in my mind? Now I can’t say no because I’m in this process of facing my fears but I definitely don’t want to do that, but how can I say no to that now?” And so, okay, so I signed up for a class as a model, I talked to, I think it was, like, a school of art in New York, and I thought, I was so self-aware, so self-conscious that I went waxing.

So, I was like, “I don’t want any hair in my body,” and I starved like the entire day because I was like, “I want to look good,” which was a huge mistake, both decisions were big mistakes because when I got to the place, before it was my turn to model, the models that were there, they had, like, curves and a lot of hair.

And that’s when I realized, “What am I doing?” I was only thinking about myself. I was not thinking about the students. And the students need something to draw, they need more hair and curves and all these things, and I was so self-aware that I was removing all of that. And so, at the beginning when I undressed, I went to the room, immediately I turned around, I gave my back to the students because I was so afraid to look at their faces. And then the professor was like, “Okay, Michelle, can you turn around now?” It was like quick 5-minute poses.

So, after five minutes, she was like, “Please turn around,” and I was dying. I was like so embarrassed but, at the same time, I had this really interesting change of thought where I went from thinking about me, and how I look, and how I’m being perceived, to thinking about them and what they need in their class to succeed. And then, at that moment, I started bending myself and finding interesting shapes to give them something to draw. And it was really interesting having that transformative, I guess, thoughts in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then how did it wrap up?

Michelle Poler

So, they all knew that I was facing a fear, that I don’t normally do this, and they were like really supportive at that point, and then they were clapping and cheering, and they showed me their drawings.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, so there you have it. And so, you have one sort of master key right there, was shifting the focus away from yourself onto others and being of service. That’s pretty cool.

Michelle Poler

I realized no one is judging us in the same way that we judge ourselves. I was judging myself so much, I was the only one judging myself, and that thought, that, I guess, aha moment stays with me every single time that I’m afraid to put myself out there.

Pete Mockaitis

That is powerful. And so, you share that and many other such insights in your book Hello, Fears: Crush Your Comfort Zone and Become Who You’re Meant to Be. Can you lay it on us, what are some of the master principles that you’ve unearthed here?

Michelle Poler

Well, I divided the book into 10 chapters, and they’re all the 10 different fears that stops us from becoming who we’re meant to be from fulfilling our potential. And some of the main aha moments that I share in the book are related to the fear of rejection and failure. Those, at the end of the day, are the biggest fears that hold us back from pursuing what we actually want to go after, and fulfilling our own definition of success.

At the end of the day, it’s not about skydiving or holding tarantulas. It’s about what we tell ourselves in that moment where we’re about to take a risk, a risk that is aligned to our dreams. That’s the most important thing because it’s not about facing any fears, it’s not about facing a hundred fears. I’m not here to tell you to do that. It’s about facing the right fears, the ones that are holding you back from the life that you actually want to live.

And so, one of the things that I share in there is one of the most powerful tools that I have, and that have changed the lives of so many people is that, you know, the typical question that, I don’t know, why on earth we are used to asking ourselves or other people around us when we’re about to face a fear, and it’s, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Have you ever asked yourself that question or somebody else?

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly.

Michelle Poler

That’s a really terrible question. Because when you think about what’s the worst that could happen, immediately your mind goes to the risk, and that’s not helpful when you’re trying to face a fear. And even though I know the intention of the question is to help us understand that we’re not going to die, but we might get rejected, we might get fired, we might be embarrassed. There are other things that might happen if we take certain risks.

So, instead of asking ourselves, “What’s the worst that can happen?” I started asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen?” That question brings your mind to focus on the reward instead of the risks. And that is the main reason why we, in the first place, decide to face a fear because we want something, we desire something, so let’s focus on that instead of the risk that that may bring.

And it’s not that I’m telling you do not consider the risk. We’re human and that is the first thing that we’ll consider anyways, but we forget to consider the reward. And that is why, so often, we stay in our comfort zones. So, next time you’re about to do something scary, something that is worth it but that’s outside of your comfort zone, ask yourself, “What’s the best that can happen?” Try to put yourself, your mind, in that scenario, and that is the one thing that will encourage you to take action.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s handy. Thank you.

And, Michelle, you’ve also got a strategy for, specifically, dealing with impostor syndrome. What’s that?

Michelle Poler

Well, impostor syndrome is the one thing that keeps us from really going after the things that we want to do because we tell ourselves that we don’t deserve that, that we’re not worthy of, and we ask ourselves, “Why me? Why would people listen to me, my message? Who am I to be someone to be heard?”

And I ask people to ask themselves, “Why not me?” That is a question I ask myself before doing this project, and putting it out there, because I was like, “Why would people follow me? Like, why would I talk about fear? Who am I?” And then I’m like, “Why not me? Am I not passionate enough? Am I not creative enough? Am I not intelligent enough? Do I don’t want this enough? I do.” So, it’s about betting on yourself.

And one question, like a different question I always ask myself, and this really also helps with impostor syndrome, is, “What is everybody else doing? And how can I be more me?” I don’t have anything against Google, but people Google too many things, and they Google how to dress up for conferences, how to speak in public, how to do all these things.

And I never Google anything, unless it’s an address or something like that, or a recipe, but before going to Google, I always ask myself, “How would I do this? How would I speak in public? How would I dress for a conference? How would I do an icebreaker?” Like, anything, I always ask myself, “How would I do it?” before I research other people. I actually avoid researching other people because I want to make sure that anything I do comes from me.

If I’m going to do research, I’m going to do it myself, I’m going to do my own research. When we own who we are, and our authentic selves, we are not going to have to deal with the impostor syndrome. The impostor syndrome is when we’re trying to be somebody else to fit in, to be accepted, to be liked. But if you’re just really trying to be yourself because you like who you are, you accept who you are, you give yourself permission to just be you, there will not be any impostor syndrome that can stop you.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s really a fun perspective in terms of if I am not trying to fit into a mold or a role, then the impostor syndrome goes away because the comparison goes away. It’s like, “Oh, I’m not a big shot like these people who are doing these things in this way,” because you didn’t even bring that up in the first place. It’s like, “I’m just going to do how I do…I’m just going to do this thing the way I imagine it ought to be done,” as opposed to trying to fit another set of expectations, which I may very well fail to meet because they’re not mine.

Michelle Poler

That’s why I encourage people, instead of comparing yourself, contrast. I’ve been practicing that for so many years already. Like, since I was little, I didn’t want to be like anybody else. I think this was, I have to thank my mom for this, in that she, in the first place, she called me Michelle because she was like, “I don’t know any Michelle in the world, so then I won’t have any expectations. I just want you to be who you are,” since the beginning, and she was always very curious about who I am, and always listening to me.

And I always felt like I had a voice, and I’m really grateful for that. And that is what I want to encourage people now to see that they have a voice, that it matters, that that’s their own, and that’s all we want. We don’t want a copycat. We don’t want more of what we already know and have. We want real people with real problems, real solutions, real ideas.

Pete Mockaitis

And then, to that end, I suppose as you’re doing you and living your life and approaching things the way you want to, you’re going to get some criticisms, you’re going to have of those haters. What are your favorite approaches for dealing with this kind of stuff that comes your way?

Michelle Poler

The first thing is that it’s so important to understand that we are not here to be liked by everybody, and that is okay. I’d rather be loved by a few than liked by everybody. And the more you want to be liked by everybody, the more generic you will sound, and the less you will connect with people. The more you are daring to be disliked by others, the more true to yourself you’ll be, and the more you’ll connect with the right audience. And, for me, that’s priceless.

And I’ve heard a lot of people that they don’t like me, and they say, “Michelle, I can’t stand you. I can’t stand your voice or how self-confident you are,” because I am very self-confident, and people don’t like that. But then there’s another group of people that really admire that, and that they want to be like this, and they want to learn from me so they buy my programs, and they buy my books, and they listen to my talks. And they actually get really inspired to change their own lives. And, to me, that’s enough.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. Well, so that’s a great perspective, that we’re not trying to be liked by everybody. We’re just loved by a few, and that’s enough. And so, help us, if we’re there intellectually, and we’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. I agree. That checks out,” and yet emotionally we’re not there, how do you recommend we get there?

Michelle Poler

So, I want to ask you something. Do you like everybody? If you have a party at your house, would you like everybody to be there? Or, can you think of a few people that you’re like, “I’d rather not have him in my house. I’d rather not hang out with that person”? And every time, for example, on social media, if I lose followers, I don’t think, “Oh, they don’t like me.” I’m like, “Maybe I don’t even like them either. Like, we’re just not a match, and that’s okay.”

Like I was saying, we’re not here to be liked by everybody, just like you don’t like everybody. It’s okay if people don’t like you. But those people you don’t like, they’re loved by other people, and that’s fine too. I think we’re not supposed to be a match for everybody in anything in life, in love, in jobs, as influencers, as anything, and I’m okay with that.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then when you’re in the midst of doing something you’re afraid of, do you have any specific mantras, self-talk, pump-up rituals, any tactical things you do when you are about to enter into the fearful place, and you want to make sure that you go forward instead of running away?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, sure. So, like I told you at the beginning of this conversation, I spent my entire life avoiding fear, avoiding discomfort because every single time that I experience that feeling in my body, when you’re about to do something scary and your stomach starts telling you, “Stop it! I don’t want to go that route. Like, it’s not safe.”

I used to interpret that feeling as a sign of my body telling me, “Don’t go that way. It’s dangerous and it’s a sign that you shouldn’t do that.” It’s my intuition trying to protect me. And I realized that that feeling is also growth. That, for me, was a huge realization because I thought, “Oh, my body is protecting me,” and I realized now that my body was protecting me from growth, from opportunity. And growth feels like that. It feels uncomfortable.

So, every time now that I experience that feeling in my body of, “I am uncomfortable. My stomach is telling me not to go that way,” I understand that there’s an opportunity there. And now, instead of avoiding it, I choose that.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, through practice, repetitions, you’ve just made the connection that, “Oh, doing this thing that I’m afraid of is what makes for growth. So, this fear feeling is really just the pre-growth feeling, and that’s that.”

Michelle Poler

Yes, it was over and over again, as I was doing the project, every single day, if you ask me, you haven’t asked me this, but everybody asks me the same question, “What’s the biggest fear that you faced?” And the biggest fear is the one you haven’t faced. It’s so hard for me to tell you and answer for that question now because I already faced them.

Every single day of the project, I thought, “Okay, this was not that bad. Tomorrow I’m going to die. I can’t.” It’s going to be the worst one because I haven’t done it, because the fear is the unknown, but after I did it, every single day would be like, “Okay, that wasn’t that bad. Tomorrow is the worst one.” So, I can’t even think which one was the worst one because after I did all of them, none of them was as bad as what I thought they were going to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a huge lesson right there in terms of, “Hey, take it from Michelle. She’s done this a hundred times, plus a hundred document of times and then more that each time it wasn’t as bad as you feared it would be.” And I’m curious, so that was the experience over and over and over again, “Oh, I’m really scared of this thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad. I’m really scared of the next thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad.” So, I’m curious, somewhere along the line after 50 days or 70 days, did you come to think that the next day wasn’t going to be so bad?

Michelle Poler

No.

Pete Mockaitis

No? Okay.

Michelle Poler

And I’m still a fearful person. People think that I’m fearless now, they’re like, “Oh, my fearless friend, you faced so many fears. I want to be fearless like you.” I’m quite the opposite. And, actually, being called fearless is like a disservice to what I actually am. It’s actually the opposite of brave. Fearless is doing the things that don’t scare you.

So, what’s the courage in there? Why would I be proud of being fearless? I’m more proud of being brave. That means that I was definitely afraid every single time that I faced a fear and still I conquered that fear, like I still showed up. And I think that is more powerful, more valuable, more inspiring than being fearless.

Pete Mockaitis

So, now you have the perception, “Oh, this fear feeling equals that I’m about to grow.” So, you know and understand that at a deep level but you still feel the full fear and think it’s going to be terrible before you embark on the thing?

Michelle Poler

Yes, and I try to avoid it at the beginning, I go through the entire process just like the first time because we’re human, and new fears come up every single day, and a fear means that it’s something that you haven’t done before, but, also, it’s really interesting to understand that if you do something and you don’t like it, it’s very fair that you don’t want to do it again, not because you’re afraid but because you don’t like it, generally, because you tried it.

My entire life, I just said, “I don’t like this,” or, “I’m afraid of this,” but I never tried those things. Like, I would say, “I don’t like oysters.” “Have you ever tried an oyster?” “No.” “So, how can you know?” So, it was so important for me to just expose myself to all these fears, try all these things, and now I can tell you with all certainty that I do not rollercoasters. I tried them and I don’t like them, and I don’t want to try them again. But I could if I need to, but I don’t want to, but I tried them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good distinction right there. Okay. So, maybe, Michelle, if we could zoom right into now, today, is there something that you are experiencing fear and avoidance of right now? And how are you talking to yourself or planning to approach it?

Michelle Poler

Well, for the first time in my life, I am experiencing fear of success. When I heard about fear of success years ago, I was like, “That makes no sense. Why would somebody be afraid of reaching their goals? It makes no sense.” But now, as a mom, and understanding how limited time is, I am afraid of success. So, I’m at that point where I’m, like, “Should I grow more? Should I stay where I am?” Like, that is one of the fears I am right now dealing with, and also the fear of having another baby. Like, we are thinking about it but, at the same time, brings a lot of fear because now we know what it is to be parents.

Pete Mockaitis

So, with the fear of success, what are you doing with that?

Michelle Poler
I guess the most important thing is to understand what is your definition of success first. And understanding also that it can change over the years, because my definition of success was to be New York Times’ bestseller, speak as much as possible, like be on the road as much as possible, be on all these shows and surround myself with these people.

And, suddenly, what if my definition of success changed to also have more free time, be more at home, have more quality time with my family? So, it’s understanding that and being at peace with what your definition of success is today, and stop pursuing an old definition of success that you had in the past, or worse yet, pursuing other people’s definition of success.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I guess what I’m thinking here is, with this fear of success, it doesn’t so much seem as much as the others as something that you’re just going to just go do it, but rather maybe it seems like there’s some thinking, some distinguishing, some sorting out, that prioritizing, soul-searching, values to finding clarifying action that’s happening with this fear.

Michelle Poler

I think what’s important here is to identify if you’re not pursuing something because it is no longer part of your definition of success, or is it because of fear? If the answer is fear, then my recommendation is to never make decisions based on fear. If only fear is what’s holding you back, then you definitely have to go for it. Find the best way to do it. If you need therapy, whatever you need, but go for it. Do not allow fear to hold you back.

But if it’s just that your definition of success changed, then that’s something that you have to adapt. So, in this point, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, “Am I not growing because of fear? Or is it because my definition changed in this moment?” And it can always change back in the future but that’s what I’m trying to understand right now. So, it’s a lot about just looking inside and being really honest with yourself, and do not ask other people what the answer is. We love asking other people, “What do you think I should do?” And people don’t know. Only you know. The answer is always inside of you.

Pete Mockaitis

And as you do this self-inquiry, having these conversations with yourself, and you land at…and sometimes it’s really trick to reach that point of clarity, that, “Oh, it’s only fear that’s holding me back,” because a lot of times, fear can masquerade as, or rationalize some things, like, “No, really, there’s a strong chance something terrible will happen if you do that thing.” So, I guess we can call that risk. Do you have some perspective on how you distinguish between this emotion of fear versus valid risks that need to be prudently considered?

Michelle Poler

That’s a really good question. I think it’s like having that honest conversation with yourself. Like, if I’m thinking about it, what I told you about the fear of success, I think it’s more aligned to I actually want to spend more time with my family, I actually want to feel more at peace and less rushed and less things to do, and all of that.

But when I talked about having another baby, that is actually fear, that’s not my definition of success. That is, I know what it takes now to have another baby, and fear is the one thing that’s holding me back but it’s something I want. So, if I determined that fear is the only thing in my way then I’m not going to let it come in the way of something I want.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, now zooming into the workplace in particular, what are some of the top fears you’ve observed people have at work, and how you recommend we tackle them?

Michelle Poler

One of the main fears people have at work is they don’t want to be themselves. They want to be who they’re expected to be. So, I’m at work, I’m expected to behave like this, to talk like this, to send emails like this. And I want to encourage people to be their true selves at all times with whoever, with your boss, with your team, with your in-laws, with anybody. I think that that is the definition of living an authentic life, and people say, “Well, at my work, they wouldn’t like my real self.” Then maybe you’re not at the right job, that’s what I would say.

I think that we only have one life. I’m very mindful about that. And one of my purposes in life is to live life to the fullest, is to really enjoy my life, is to feel that every day counts, and I want to be happy. And there is a huge difference between being comfortable and being happy. And people, without realizing it, they’re pursuing comfort, not happiness. And I feel like it’s one of my missions to make people see this and understand that comfort will not lead to happiness.

And we’re told this since we’re little. Since we’re little, it’s like, “You need to find the right job. You need to have stability. You need to find a partner. You need to have all these things.” And when you check all the boxes, and you ask yourself, “Is this what happiness is about?” If you’re not truly happy, it means that you’re checking other people’s boxes, and you should check your own boxes. That’s what will lead you to your own happiness and not comfort.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And now let’s hear about, at work, folks have a fear of speaking up in a meeting or asking for what they really want and need. Any tips on how we can tackle those in particular?

Michelle Poler

For me, the best strategy is if you really believe that you deserve something, you’re certain about that, you’re not just being entitled, or you want it because somebody else got it, you feel like, “I deserve this. They’re not recognizing me and I have to speak up for myself,” first, you have to do it. If not, you’re betraying yourself and you are rejecting yourself. Because of the fear of rejection that you’re getting, you have that fear, “I don’t want to be rejected. I don’t want to get a no,” you are rejecting yourself. And I think that’s the worst thing that we could do.

So, first of all, encouraging people here to speak up and ask for what they know they deserve. And the strategy I would use, again, is asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen if I do this, if I ask for it?” What if you get a yes? We’re so afraid of getting a no and being judged that we stay where we are. Every time that we choose comfort over growth, we feel like we’re staying where we are but we’re actually moving backwards.

Every single time we’re choosing comfort, we’re moving backwards because the rest of the world is moving forward. And I think it’s also, like, our duty to speak up for ourselves. And if you know you deserve this, you ask for it and you don’t get it, maybe you’re at a place that they don’t appreciate you enough.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michelle Poler

This quote is by Steven Pressfield, and this is the quote that inspired me to put my 100 Day project out there.

So, it says, “Are you born a writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it. If you were meant to cure cancer, or write a symphony, or crack cold fusion, and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michelle Poler

Well, I’m a big fan of Brene Brown. All of her research that she’s done about empathy, about language, about vulnerability, anything that is in her books, I’m a huge fan of those. I learned so much from her.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Michelle Poler

I would say The War of Art by Steven Pressfield from the quote that I read. That book is very simple and very life-changing. Well, also, a kids’ book.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure.

Michelle Poler

Can I say a kids’ book that I feel every adult should read. It’s called Maybe by Kobi Yamada.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

Favorite tool, Videoleap. That’s where I edit all my reels. So easy to create a reel and find the perfect music and everything through Videoleap. So, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Michelle Poler

Dancing before any phone call, any important phone call, like with clients, or doing a podcast interview. Before coming to this podcast, I danced by myself in my office. It just gets me in the right mood.

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

Michelle Poler

The question, “What’s the best that can happen?” It’s the one that I get the most quoted on. And if I can share another one, is when you believe in yourself so much, you make others believe in you as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

You can go to my website, MichellePoler.com, or if you want to watch me embarrass myself facing all 100 fears, you can go to 100DaysWithoutFear.com, or follow me on Instagram @hellofears.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

I would say the final challenge would be find the right place for you. Don’t settle. Don’t settle for anything in life, not for a job, not for a partner, not for a city, not for a home, not for a dog. Find what feels right for you.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Michelle, thank you. This was a ton of fun. And I wish you many adventures and fun times crushing more fears.

Michelle Poler

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Feb 05
0

933: How Building a Habit of Bravery Transforms Everything with Todd Henry

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Todd Henry shares how to build the courage to chase after opportunities amidst uncertainty.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to muster courage in the moment 
  2. The biggest myth that holds us back 
  3. Five steps to feel braver every day 

About Todd

Todd Henry teaches leaders and organizations how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance. He is the author of seven books: The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, Louder Than Words, Herding Tigers, The Motivation Code, Daily Creative, The Brave Habit, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and he speaks and consults across dozens of industries on creativity, leadership, and passion for work.

With more than fifteen million downloads, his podcast offers weekly tips for how to stay prolific, brilliant, and healthy.

Resources Mentioned

Todd Henry Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Todd, welcome back.

Todd Henry

Pete, it is so good to be back on the show. Thanks for the kind invitation.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, thank you. You’ve got a fresh book, and you’ve said a lot of interesting things, and written a lot of cool books. I’m curious, why bravery as the topic now?

Todd Henry

10 years ago, I wrote a book called Die Empty. It released, and did really well, but there was something that I overlooked in that book, and it always plagued me. There was one topic that I didn’t write about. And it was kind of one of those forehead-slap moments when I realized, “Oh, there’s kind of an important thing I overlooked here,” and that topic was bravery.

Because I talked about all the ways that we can overcome these hurdles we encounter, these pitfalls, when doing difficult creative work, and some strategies for doing that, but the one key element that I found in people and in teams who were willing and able to do that was that they exhibited bravery. And so, I kind of committed to looking into, to investigating that topic of bravery.

And my ingoing assumption was that, “Well, some people are just wired for it. They’re just more risk-tolerant and some people aren’t.” But the more I researched the topic, I realized, actually, bravery is exhibited in all different kinds of places by all different kinds of people, and people who historically had not exhibited bravery suddenly started exhibiting bravery, and vice versa.

What I realized was that bravery is not a baked-in personality trait, that bravery is actually a habit, it’s a discipline that we can train ourselves to exhibit. And so, that was kind of the initial source of the book.

And so, for the last six years, it’s been a passion project. I’ve been working on this book, and it took me six years to kind of pull it all together, and now it’s finally here. So, it’s called The Brave Habit, and it’s about how to develop the habit of bravery as you approach creative work, leadership, relationships, and everything that you have to do in life.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, tell us, what impact does having upgraded bravery deliver for us?

Todd Henry

So, I think that we often conflate two things. We conflate bravery with boldness. And we also conflate cowardice with wisdom. And what I mean by that is we all have moments in our life where we recognize an opportunity, where we see that there’s something possible for us if we were willing to act, but there’s a little voice inside of us that says, “Well, maybe it would be better if…” or, “Maybe someone else is better equipped to…” or, “You really don’t have the skills to…” or things of that nature. And that’s really cowardice whispering in our ear, but we often conflate it with wisdom. We think this is wisdom speaking to us.

And what I discovered was that there really are two things that comprise bravery in those moments. There are two core attributes, two core traits, that people who consistently ignore the voice of cowardice that comes disguised as wisdom, and, instead, choose to engage in brave action. There are two core attributes and they tend to exhibit in those moments. The first is they have an optimistic vision of the future, meaning that they have a vision of a better possible future that they could be navigating toward. And the second attribute that they tend to exhibit is a sense of perceived agency to bring that better possible future about.

So, think about a team. When I look at the teams who are consistently doing what I would consider to be brave work, they are teams who have a vision that they’re navigating toward, they have a very clear North Pole that they believe in and that they’re willing, if necessary, to sacrifice on behalf of because they believe deeply in that vision.

Versus people who have kind of a pessimistic vision of the future, “Well, I really don’t know what the future holds. And who can really tell anyway, right?” And so, that’s sort of the opposite of what I’m talking about. And they tend to have a sense of agency, meaning, “We believe that we have the platform, the proficiency, that we have people around us who can help us accomplish that vision.”

So, when you have those attributes, you’ve created a fertile field within which bravery is likely to occur. Now, it doesn’t mean it will occur but you’re creating a fertile field within which bravery is likely to occur. So, how does that play out for us as individuals in the workplace?

Well, we all have to confront uncertainty, we have big projects we’re working on, ideas maybe that are noodling around the back of our mind, and we’re thinking about bringing them into the world, but that little voice of cowardice is whispering in our ear, “Well, maybe somebody else would be better suited to do that,” “Well, maybe you should wait and let somebody else step up,” “Well, maybe you’re not the right person to lead this,” or, “Well, maybe you need to do a power grab because you need to prove that you’re the right person.” Well, that’s not necessarily bravery. That’s just boldness.

So, we have these little voices whispering in the back of our ear. In those moments where we’re tempted with cowardice, we can ask ourselves, “Okay, am I afraid to act because I don’t have a clear vision of where I’m going, or I don’t have a vision of a better possible future? Or, am I afraid to act because I don’t trust that I have agency to be able to create meaningful change in the direction of my vision?”

And simply by asking ourselves those questions consistently, by putting some qualifiers on what we feel, inherently, that self-protection instinct that we have, we can, a) develop a better narrative to help ourselves get through those moments, and, b) identify any areas where maybe we are lacking. We tend to think bravery is, “Well, just do it. Just leap. Just jump from the cliff, right? Just say the thing. Just have the conversation.”

That’s not necessarily always bravery. Sometimes it’s boldness. Boldness and bravery are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes bravery means waiting until the right time. So, when you ask yourself those questions, “Do I have a clear vision of where I’m going? And do I trust that I have the agency to be able to bring it about?”

If the answer to either of those is no, maybe the bravest thing you can do is wait as your vision is clarified, or wait until you develop the skill necessary to bring it about. That doesn’t mean you’re being a coward. That means you’re being strategic. And so, when you ask, “How does bravery benefit us?” It benefits us by giving us a sense of the places in our life where we can act in a meaningful way to develop our capacity to do work that is surprising, valuable, and, ultimately, contributive to the body of work that we want to build.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, I think there’s a lot of interesting tidbits here in terms of the voice of cowardice can be sneaky, and we may not even recognize that that’s what that is. I remember we had Kwame Christian say once early on the show that fear masquerades in many forms. And I thought that was really clever in terms of it’s procrastination, or, “You know what, maybe this isn’t the right time,” like, any number of voices. And it’s good to just say, “Oh, no, what’s really happening is I’m scared. What’s really missing here is bravery.”

And you’ve done a cool segmentation, so, “Is it a matter of vision or is it a matter of agency?” And help me out, when I’m feeling un-brave, I think what’s going on is I think, “There’s a substantial chance that this is going to go badly for me.” And so, do we categorize that as a vision matter, or an agency matter, or where does that fall into your schema?

Todd Henry

Well, that’s a really great example. Can I tell you a story of how that’s playing out actually for me right now? I think I mentioned to you, so before we started recording, I’ve been doing The Accidental Creative podcast since 2005.

As I was writing this book, I began challenging people, in the book, to ask some really brave questions and very dangerous questions, maybe. And among those questions that I began asking myself was, “If I were starting over again, would I be doing things the way that I’m doing them right now?” And the uncomfortable answer that I came to, Pete, was, “No. No, I wouldn’t.” Like, it’s fine, it’s working, people seem to enjoy it, it’s great, but would I be doing it this way? No.

Why? Because I have a vision of a way that things could be better, and I was feeling a little bit of discontentment around the way I was doing things. Well, there’s a lot of costs involved in changing something that has a substantial audience, and that has been successful, and that’s financially contributive to the bottom line of my business. There’s a substantial risk involved. And, to your point, you asked the question, “Well, what if this goes badly for me?” Yeah, there’s a lot of risk involved in doing something like that.

What compelled me to make the change that we made, which was basically completely rebranding the show, redoing the format, and eliminating thousands of back episodes of the podcast, and starting over with Episode 1 on January 1st, what compelled me to do it was that vision. I knew I had the agency to bring it about because I have created a podcast, I know how to do this, I know how to do creative work and make audio shows, but the vision was what compelled me. I had a very clear vision of what this could be.

And so, the question I asked myself was, “If I fail, will it be worth it if it’s in pursuit of a vision that I care about?” And the answer was, “Yes.” And like Seth Godin likes to say, “This might not work,” and it might not work. It still might not work. But the vision superseded my fear of failure in this case. And so, what my response was, “If it fails, I want to go down doing the thing that I believed to be the right thing. I want to pursue the vision for the work that I think is the best possible manifestation of this kind of work that I’m trying to do right now.”

And so, I think the answer to your question, that you have to be able to say, “It’s worth failing in the pursuit of this vision. It’s worth sacrificing something in the pursuit of this vision if I believe it’s the right direction.” And that doesn’t mean it’s always the case for everyone. In my case, it was, but the problem is we often don’t stop to ask the question because we just assume that the goal of life is to protect, to be comfortable.

Khalil Gibran said, “Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning the funeral.” So, when we succumb to the love of comfort, the lust for comfort, we murder our own soul. And so, the challenge I would have for listeners is, “Where are you falling prey to the love of comfort?” Not comfort itself. There’s nothing wrong with comfort, but when you fall in love with comfort, you’re inherently going to compromise what’s possible because nothing great is ever done from a position of comfort.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, then it sounds like the fear I have that things are going to go badly, in your categorization system, that’s a matter of the vision may not be clear or strong enough to overpower, in the internal tug of war, the reluctance or internal fear.

Todd Henry

Yeah, that’s right. Or, in some cases, like in organizations, it could be that that vision just hasn’t been communicated clearly enough, or people don’t understand how they play into that vision. There are a lot of organizations with people who are more than willing to be brave, and to do brave work, and to have brave conversations, and to confront uncertainty, but they don’t really understand how their efforts would matter because the leader hasn’t given a compelling vision for where the organization is going.

And so, the result is you have all these people who are at the ready, they want to do something, but they don’t really know what to do. Or, you have organizations where the leader is casting vision constantly but they’re not reinforcing the agency. They try to be overcontrolling in their organization. They step in and do the work for people instead of equipping people and giving them agency to do their own work, to come up with their own ideas. And the net result of that is people just feel powerless, they just succumb, and they say, “Okay, fine. Just tell me what to do.”

Well, are they going to do brave work? No, of course not because they’ve been robbed of a sense of agency. And so, as leaders of organizations, the biggest gift that we can give to people is to position them in places where bravery is likely to occur, which means being very clear about our vision but also speaking agency into them, speaking encouragement into them, giving them the ability to try things, to experiment, even to fail in small ways that aren’t fatal to the organization so that they have that sense of agency to act bravely in the face of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s maybe zoom way in. Let’s say we have an individual, and they want to say something that’s maybe uncomfortable, unpopular, because they are going against the status quo, they’re challenging someone so they might get offended, outraged, create some political rifts, etc. Help us out, Todd. What are the key steps to follow in order to speak up when bravery is required?

Todd Henry

So, you have to be absolutely certain that your action is in the service of a vision, of a better possible future. It’s not self-serving, it’s not bold, because boldness is mostly self-serving. Bravery is always empathetic. So, how is speaking up going to be in service of a greater vision, whether that’s creating a better environment on the team, communicating something to the leader that maybe they’re not aware of, and they need to be aware of because this is impacting everyone else around us?

So, if the answer to that is yes, and the second question you have to ask is, “Am I the right person to have this conversation?” Because if a random person at a low level of an organization decides to ambush the CEO in the lobby of the building one day and say something, well, you have no agency, you have no platform. You’re doing something but that’s just boldness. That’s not necessarily bravery because what impact is that going to have? Probably very little impact. And, in fact, it could be detrimental to the overall cause.

And so, those are the two questions you have to ask, “Am I doing this in the service of a better vision, a greater vision? Or, am I just doing this to be self-serving for my own political purposes?” And the second question you have to ask is, “Am I the right person to be able to do this? So, do I have the agency? Do I have the platform to be able to do this?”

And if the answer to that second question is no, “Well, then who does have the platform? Who am I connected to who I might be able to, then, have this conversation with and we can go together to the leader, we can go together to whoever this person is and have a conversation together because the other person has platform, they have relationship, they have credibility that maybe I don’t have?”

So, again, this framework helps you in those moments where you have to make a brave decision, it helps you sort of gauge and diagnose places where, “Well, why do I feel hesitant to do this? Oh, it’s because I don’t really have the agency to do this. I could just go ambush this person with a conversation but they’re not going to listen to me because I don’t have the right platform, but I do know someone who does, so I’m going to go to them. We’re going to have a conversation, and we’re going to go together to them, and then we’re going to have a higher probability chance of creating the change we’re trying to create.”

So, two questions, again, “Is this in service of a greater vision or in service of me?” That’s the empathy question. And then the second one is, “Do I have the credibility, the platform, the proficiency to be able to have this conversation? If not, then how can I gain that agency in order to create this meaningful change toward the vision that I’m pursuing?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you maybe share some stories in which we’ve got a professional who is finding they would like an upgrade to their bravery, and then they walked these paths of upgrading the vision, or upgrading the agency to make it happen?

Todd Henry

Yeah, so this example I shared in the book of a guy named Scott. Scott was a commercial real estate agent, and it was the very fortuitous time of the late 2000s, so right around 2008, and you can kind of imagine where this story is going because we experienced a tremendous collapse in the real estate industry, and, thus, the entire economy in 2008, and so Scott was really in danger of just being without livelihood.

And so, he was talking with his wife, and they were expecting their first child, and it was obviously a really kind of nerve-racking time for them. And he was considering the possibility of making a transition into doing residential real estate but he didn’t really have a tremendous amount of experience doing residential real estate, so he had a job offer to go sell office furniture, and he was thinking about just going to sell office furniture because, “This is something that can pay the bills with our first child on the way.”

And as he was talking about this with his wife, his wife said, “Hey, listen, you have all of this experience in the real estate industry, you have some connections in the real estate industry, albeit not in the residential real estate industry, and you have a very clear vision of how you could do this differently, how you could be a different kind of real estate agent that could be more attractive to people, that could actually be kind of a partner with people rather than just sort of being the go-between in these transactions.”

And she said, “Let’s do this. Let’s establish some time, a timeframe, let’s call it six months, and why don’t you try this, let’s see what happens. And if we see some momentum, then we’ll keep moving forward. And if we don’t, then you can always go take the office furniture job, and we’ll just say, ‘Okay, now you’re an office furniture salesman,’ or whatever.”

And so, he did. So, he decided to launch his real estate practice, and it did not go well for the first handful of months, and it was a really difficult time in the market. But just in the nick of time, he did make his first sale, and that was enough to generate some cashflow and kind of keep the business moving forward. And the way that he did it was because he was following his vision, his vision of a better possible future, the way that things could be different in the real estate industry.

And the reason I share that story is because his instinct in the moment was, “Well, I just need to retreat to the easiest thing I can do, which is go take a salaried job to pay the bills.” Someone else came along, someone who had a very vested interest in his success came along and spoke agency into him, said, “Hey, you could do that. That’s fine. But that’s not what you’re capable of.”

“You don’t even know what you’re capable of yet. We haven’t even tried yet. You have agency you haven’t even tapped into. So, why don’t you go try this? I see what you’re capable of. I know what you’re capable of. You have a vision. Go try this.” He had someone, his wife, who spoke courage into him. And so, Scott did because she put him in that very fertile field where brave action is likely to occur, that place of agency and vision.

Now, 10 years later, his real estate practice is one of the top real estate practices in the country within his company, which is remarkable. But even if it hadn’t worked out that way, would he have made the brave choice? Even if it hadn’t worked out for him, would he have made the brave choice?

The answer, I believe, is yes, absolutely, because bravery has nothing to do with outcomes. You can make a good decision, Pete, that has a bad outcome, and you can make a bad decision that has a good outcome. That’s why it’s so difficult often to analyze our decisions because we tend to associate our outcomes with our decisions. But the reality is we make decisions with the best information we have at the time, and we can’t always control where those decisions are going to lead.

And so, even if Scott had failed, he still made a brave choice, and it still was probably a good decision for him to try it to see if he could make it work. And that’s part of the thing that I think leads us to succumb to cowardice, is that we are constantly analyzing our past decisions through our present understanding, and the net result is that we think that things were bad decisions, when, actually, they may have been good decisions, they just had bad outcomes. We made the best decision we could at the time.

So, I think that story of Scott is one that kind of illustrates what it looks like to have someone speaking agency and optimism into you in those moments of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Thank you. And we had Annie Duke, a professional poker player, say a similar point in terms of you may have made the best decision though the outcome didn’t work out, and that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the best decision. So, that’s good to consider. I’d love to hear the counterpoint to that in terms of we may be more likely to regret what we didn’t do. How do we judiciously, astutely, wisely, prudently determine, “Ah, this harebrained scheme of mine, I should kill right now rather than pursue it to my detriment”?

Todd Henry

Yeah. So, interestingly, we’re doing an episode of our podcast that kind of deals with that, how sometimes we get frozen in these moments. And as part of the interview, we revisited the conversation with Seth Godin about his book The Dip. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book but in the book, he talks about…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, it’s short. I read it. It’s fun.

Todd Henry

Yeah, the fantastic. The two ways that we get stuck. The first way is what he calls a cul-de-sac, which is basically a dead end where we’re just going round and round and round and round the cul-de-sac, and it feels like we’re making progress but, really, we’re just stuck, we don’t really have a vision. And the best thing to do in the cul-de-sac is just to quit because you’re never going to get anywhere if you’re in a cul-de-sac.

And then he said the second thing, the second kind of place where we get stuck is in what he calls the dip. And the dip is that inevitable difficult moment after we’ve started a creative project, and we have all this energy at the beginning because it’s new, and it’s fresh, and we have a vision, and then it gets really hard, and so a lot of people give up. Scott Belsky calls this the project plateau. It’s the moment where it starts getting really hard but we don’t have the same excitement about the work, and so we tend to want to quit. But you don’t quit in the dip.

If you have a vision, of the way things could be, and you can see a path to get there, you don’t quit in the dip. You keep pushing. You keep going because there are rewards on the other side. So, when we talk about a vision of a better possible future, and the agency to bring it about, that’s really kind of where I’m playing as well, is when you get into those moments where you’re in the dip, and it’s uncertain, you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know if you really feel like pushing forward, if you have a vision, you need to push forward.

If you believe that you have the agency, the will, the capability to bring that about, you need to push forward. Not only do you need it, we need you to push forward because that’s how the world moves forward. So, if you’re in a cul-de-sac, quit. If you have no vision, quit. If you don’t believe you have the agency, just quit. Or, develop it, develop the vision, develop the agency, but if you’re in the dip, the brave thing to do is to keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. Okay. Well, Todd, I would love to get your perspective. Do you have any top do’s or don’ts for folks looking to be awesome at their job as they are contemplating this bravery stuff?

Todd Henry

Yeah, the main thing, and this is why the book called The Brave Habit, is that bravery is a habit, which means that we can build practices into our life to prepare us for moments where we need to be brave. So, the main do I would say is have some time that you block off in your life, and I walk people through this in the book, where you basically follow B-R-A-V-E. Which is basically block time once a week to look at your calendar, look at your commitments, look at everything coming up in your life that week, conversations in your life, projects you’re accountable for. So, block the time, and the reason I say that first is because it seems like an obvious thing but we don’t do it, we don’t plan time for the things that are most important.

The second part is review. Review upcoming conversations that maybe you’re a little nervous about. Review client projects, conversations, that you’re going to be having, and review them for points of uncertainty, for tensions that you know are inevitably going to be there. The third is claim agency, meaning assess what agency you have in those moments. What are you bringing to those moments that you uniquely are able to contribute? Why are you right person to have that conversation? Why are you the right person to do that project? So, re-root yourself in your sense of agency.

The fourth is vision. So, what is your vision for each of those relationships, for each of those projects, for your work as a whole, your vision for your life, your vision for your relationships? What is your vision? Re-root yourself. And then, finally, express your intent, E, that’s the E part. Express your intent, meaning, “Here is the outcome that I am committed to for each of these areas.” By doing this, what you’re doing is getting ahead of those moments.

We’re often surprised by these moments where we have to be brave. We come into a conversation, and we’re completely ill-prepared because we haven’t done the pre-work to set ourselves up for bravery, for exhibiting bravery in the moment. But, again, as we get ahead of it, and as we build practices to prepare us for those moments, then, in the moment itself, we’re not reacting. We’re simply enacting the plan that we’ve already put in place, that we know that we’re going to enact. And then as we do that consistently over time, it becomes more of a habit for us.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Lovely. And any don’ts?

Todd Henry

The biggest don’t, and this is, by the way, true of anything that we do as creative professionals, people have to solve problems, is don’t wing it. Talent gets you in the game but your practices keep you in the game. Talent is the price of entry. People think that they can wing their entire career based on talent alone. You cannot. You will, eventually, fail. You’ll eventually succumb to the negative drag forces of the marketplace.

You have to have practices in your life to prepare you for those moments and to help you be successful. And so, that would be the biggest thing, is don’t wing it. Have practices in your life to prepare you for critical moments.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

I think the biggest thing that I would encourage people to consider is, listen, your life is comprised of moments, and how you approach those moments is going to define your life. We tend to think of life as a passage of days, and years, and months, and whatever, and that’s true but the reality is some of those moments are weighted far more significantly than others.

And how you respond in critical moments in your life is going to determine the arch of your life, and, ultimately, the body of work that you build, the relationships you have, and the degree to which you have deep regret later in your life. So, your moment is coming, make sure that you’re prepared for that moment when it arrives.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

Thomas Merton is one of my favorite thinkers, one of my favorite writers.

And he once wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everyone else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular, and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it, they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they justify their very haste as a species of integrity.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

So, one thing that is really interesting to me in researching this book, I came across the work of a couple of key people. One was Martin Seligman, who’s kind of known as the father of positive psychology, and the other one was Albert Bandura, who did significant research into agency, and how agency affects us.

And one of the key tidbits that came out of the research was that people who live with an optimistic mindset versus a pessimistic mindset tend to outlive people who have a pessimistic mindset in their life, to the extent that people who live with a generally pessimistic mindset exhibit health effects that are similar to smoking packs of cigarettes a day in their life. Those are the kinds of health effects that they experience. Pessimism has such a negative drag on your physical health that is the equivalent of smoking packs of cigarettes a day. So, I thought that was pretty fascinating, actually.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Todd Henry

I was watching a video of a guy who was talking about the five-foot shelf of books, which is the complete Harvard Classics which were assembled like in the early 1900s by the president of Harvard. And he said, “If you read these books, this five-foot shelf of books, you will have all that you need in terms of, like, a Western liberal education.”

And so, I decided to commit myself to reading the complete Harvard Classics.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Can you share with us a couple titles that we’d recognize in that and a couple titles that we wouldn’t?

Todd Henry

Absolutely. So, right now, I’m in the midst of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is the very first part.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s so good. All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to help you be awesome at your job?

Todd Henry

The tool that I use more than any other tool right now, as a podcaster, as a content creator, is Descript. It has radically changed my world, and I don’t say that very often. I’m not, like, a big jump-on-the-bandwagon-of-a-tool kind of guy but Descript has completely changed my world. If you do any audio or video creating, you 100% need to be using Descript.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

The one that I see circulating the most, because it got picked up by some of the, like, habit apps and things, is, “Don’t let your rituals become ruts,” and so, I think, every so often, or I know, every so often, it’s important to do a review of your rituals and make sure that they’re still serving you, and they’re not just there for you to serve them.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

So, ToddHenry.com is my personal website. You can find all my books. Our podcast is called Daily Creative with Todd Henry. We just started over with episode one. So, you could listen to the podcast where you get podcasts. My books are at ToddHenry.com or wherever you buy your books. The Brave Habit is available now.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

It’s really important that we understand that your time is finite, and this is almost something we say so often, it becomes cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason, it’s because it’s true. And so, treat today, treat this moment, treat your next conversation, treat the project you’re working on not as if it’s going to be your last, but as if it’s going to be your legacy.

We often hear this advice, “Live every day as if it’s your last,” and I think that’s terrible advice because if it was my last day, I’m going to eat donuts and do whatever I want to do because I don’t have to worry about my health. Instead, I like to think, “What if today was my legacy? What if this was the only day? What if a biographer was going to follow me around today and look at everything I do, and then was going to write the story of my life based on this day? How might I approach this day differently? How might I approach that next conversation or that conflict differently? How much effort might I put into this project I’m working on?”

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Well, Todd, thank you. I wish you much fun and bravery.

Todd Henry

Well, thank you. And thanks so much for having me on the show, and thanks for the great work that you do.

Jan 25
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931: How to Overcome Obstacles and Kickstart Change with R. Michael Anderson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

R. Michael Anderson shares how vulnerability can be your greatest strength as a leader.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why to be more open about your struggles
  2. The drivers behind your worst decisions
  3. The key relationship that everyone overlooks

About Michael

Michael Anderson, MBA, MA has a striking combination that creates truly impactful transformation in leaders – he has the real-life business success of founding, scaling and exiting three software companies, plus the educational background of a Masters Degree in Psychology.

 This combination gives him the unique ability to connect to other leaders as a peer, then teaches evidence-based leadership skills that genuinely drive behaviour and performance. 

With his background in psychology and neuroscience, he transforms managers into true leaders with high-performing teams in high-growth companies. He’s written two best-selling business leadership books, contributes to Entrepreneur.com, and is a former radio-show host. 

Resources Mentioned

R. Michael Anderson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

R. Michael Anderson
Pete, good to be here again. It’s been forever.

Pete Mockaitis
It has. And I was looking at our last conversation, and we moved pretty quickly past your story, which I really want to dig into, into some detail, to hear about your dramatic rise and fall, and rise again, and what was happening on the outside, as well as what was happening on the inside because, I think, when it comes to a Leadership Mindset 2.0, and impostor syndrome, all this stuff, I think there’s gold lessons along your journey if you’re ready to go there.

R. Michael Anderson
I am, Pete. I share it very freely, and it’s nice to be here with you and have some time and I appreciate you asking about the outside and the inside because, as we all know, they’re related but, often when I share this, a lot of people will say that it really resonates. And a lot of times, it’s nice to know that other people go through some of the crazy stuff that we all go through as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, start us, how about you just wrapped your semi pro basketball – that’s a whole another conversation, another story and you’re getting in the business game? Let’s start from that beginning.

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then I moved out to California. I joined a software company. They moved me around the world. And then I moved back to California in my mid-30s. There was a gap in the marketplace, and I don’t want to say by accident, but a couple of my old clients asked me to come help them.

I come from enterprise software, so Microsoft Dynamics and SAP, and so there were some big, large former clients that just needed help because the company that I used to be with that got bought out wasn’t giving a good service, and so I started servicing these clients. And then, a lot of the other clients found out that had this software, and next thing you know I had a proper business, I had to deal with offices, there’s these $100-million-dollar companies that used our software to run their business, and was being all managed by little me, and I was not emotionally ready to do all this.

And what happened is, all of a sudden, we have a payroll in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, million, per month, and I was a good business person, I understood management, I understood the industry, but I didn’t understand leadership. And I never knew what emotional intelligence was, and I didn’t have a lot of great leaders to look up to. So, you can imagine, Pete, it was really difficult around those years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m intrigued. Now, your success was driven just because, well, by golly, there was a gap in the market, and you have exactly what these folks need. And word spread, and, bada-bing, bada-boom, a lot of revenue, a lot of responsibility, a lot of clients, a lot of employees real quick, and you were not feeling so great on the inside in the midst of this external success.

R. Michael Anderson
That’s so right. Because the funny thing is, from the outside, everything looked great. We were so successful, I was on the frontpage of the newspaper.

Pete Mockaitis
Congrats.

R. Michael Anderson
To be quite honest, I had some substance abuse issues around in the early part of my life, and the pressure made them get worse. My father was an alcoholic, I had alcohol problems, I was doing hard drugs. And as this pressure mounted, that became more of a crutch, and so that was getting worse, not getting better, by any means.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you zoom actually way in on the alcohol and hard drugs? What were you thinking and feeling? And what did the alcohol and drugs do for you in those moments?

R. Michael Anderson
That’s a great question. I think I did that to not think because I didn’t have any, I’d say, tools. Like, I didn’t know who I was, and all this stuff was happening so fast. And I was working, like, crazy hours. I would bill my own. I was a consultant so I would bill myself out for eight or ten hours, and go home and do the administration or any or all of it. A couple off hours I’d do sales, and then I hired my friends from the industry.

And it’s, like, there was so much going on. And, Pete, I remember back then, my only goal was to get to the end of the day, get to the end of the week. I was so stressed out and burnt out. I wasn’t even burnt out. I could work massive hours. Burnt out is not the right word. It’s like life was just happening around me, and I was doing my best to hold on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, there’s that sensation of, “Boy, just got to get to the end of the day. It’s tough. Life is happening.” And then what did the drugs and alcohol do for you?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, I think it just gave me a little respite. It’s like stuff was out of control, and my personality really likes to control. And with the substances, it was like I would have a little bit of time that would just numb everything because I couldn’t take everything that was going on, so it was like a little oasis. As bad as that sound, in a way, like I needed it because I didn’t have any other tools.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I totally resonate with that, and I haven’t used illegal drugs much in my life to resonate, but I think there are other times we seek out some kind of oasis, retreat, respite in a way that’s not so helpful, whether it’s overeating, or Netflix bingeing, or whatever. It seems like a break, but then, unfortunately, it doesn’t really satisfy, as my experience, and that of many others.

So, tell us, back on the outer world, you’ve got a lot of busyness, a lot of revenue, a lot of employees, and a lot of drugs, what happens now?

R. Michael Anderson
That’s it. That’s where it ends now. No, I was joking. Well, of course, like anything else, not like anything else, but it started just everything got worse. And I had a key employee who I gave some equity to, pretty much just out of my insecurity. He was doing a good job, and he was taking on some responsibility, but I felt so lonely, and we worked a lot of extra hours together so I gave him some equity, and he had some substance abuse issues, too.

And we ended up getting into an argument one day. It was Wednesday, it was 10:00 a.m., he came in my office, he asked me a question, and tensions were high because I wanted to keep growing the business, and he wanted to just have a bit of a lifestyle business. There was a couple things that we didn’t agree on, so tensions were high.

And he asked me, just like an everyday customer question, an operational question, I don’t remember what it was. And I gave an answer he wasn’t expecting, and he didn’t really want, and so we started to get into an argument. I’m pretty cool, I was just watching him get angrier and angrier. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen when somebody gets so angry, they get red and start shaking and yelling. That’s what he started to do.

And I said, “Look, it’s Wednesday, 10:00 a.m., there’s employees around. Why don’t you go back to your office. Let’s talk about this after everybody leaves.” And I thought that was the end of it. He went away down the hall back to his office, but then he popped his head back in, and he goes, “I’m going to wipe that smile off your face.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy.

R. Michael Anderson
And then I watched him come around my desk, and he cocks back, and, with all his might, he hits me.

Pete Mockaitis
Whoa!

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah. I saw it coming, so I turned away but I felt the blow on my shoulder, and then we just sort of looked at each other, and then he left. And I got up and shut my door. And people asked me, like, “What were you thinking back? What were you feeling?” I’m like, “I think I was a bit in shock.” If you’ve ever had something so crazy happen to you, and you know there’s going to be big repercussions, I think that what was going on.

And I kept asking myself, “Did this really happen?” because I knew if it did, that there was going to have to be some major things going on, obviously, and I didn’t want to go down that path, so I was trying to do a reality check to see if what just happened really happened.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. You know, Michael, by crazy coincidence, I, too, was, one time, punched completely unexpectedly but it was by a total stranger in Chicago, at the Chipotle in Belmont and Broadway. And I had to say, it was so weird, I, too, had the same response. I was, like, looking at other people, just like, “Did that just happen?” And I’m okay, thank goodness, but it is.

When something that crazy happens, you doubt your own senses. Like, I’m pretty sure that just happened, but I would like some kind of a confirmation from somewhere that that really did occur. So, I hear you, it is wild. It’s out there.

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, that’s a good phrase you used that I never heard before – doubt your own senses. That’s what I was doing. And then I called up a business owner who I met recently, closest thing that I had to a mentor, and I’m like, “This just happened. What do I do?” because I was, like, “Nothing prepared me for this moment.” He was like, “Dude, if this happened once, this is going to happen again. You got to address this. You can’t blow this off.”

So, I went down to the police station, I go, “I’m here to report an assault.” They’re looking at me, they’re like, “What?” I’m like, “Well, my business partner just assaulted me.” And they said, “Oh, do you want us to arrest him?” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. No, I don’t think so. What else can I do?” They’re like, “Well, you can’t do much else. You can write…”

And so, I logged it, so I wrote it in a book, the date and time and what happened, just so there’s a record of it. And then the next day, I called my attorney, and then the next day, when he came to the office, I had an armed guard hand him a restraining order, a termination letter because I still owned the majority of the company, and then a copy of the lawsuit.

And then, as each one of my employees came up, I had to sit them down and tell them, “My COO, my business partner, so and so, is no longer here because he hit me.” And most of the people reported to him, and then I had to call all of our customers, and he was the executive project manager on a lot of the big projects, and I said, “Hey, the guy you’ve been working with every day for a year, on your multimillion-dollar project, he’s no longer here, and I can’t tell you why.” So, that was a crappy day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so then, shifting into the internal game, like what were you thinking in the midst of having to share this news with your clients and employees?

R. Michael Anderson
I don’t even know how I got through it. I do remember I joined a peer group of entrepreneurs around that time, and when they found out this happened, because I think it happened, I had the weekend to, like, prepare all that stuff. But one guy called me every morning, he’s like, “How are you feeling?” I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap.” He’s like, “Get out of bed,” because I’m basically in depression at that point, that everything just came crashing down.

And, luckily, I had some people that really helped me think through things because I think, often, that happened during a crisis where the most important things you need to do, or within the first 24, 48 hours, and, luckily, Pete, I had a couple people around me that really, really helped me and supported me in that time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Okay. Well, so then what happens next?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, you talked about the internal, so that evening after I got through that day, I’m sitting on my couch, and I was about to go in my normal methodology of escape, and smoke some weed, do some coke, and drink some whiskey. But I just paused, and I started reflecting on my life, and I’m like, “What’s going on? I’ve always wanted to own a business. And I own a business, and I hate it. It sucks. It’s not fun at all.”

And it’s not becoming more fun as it gets larger, and I’m like, “Maybe I should just go back to being a programmer. I’m good at that. And it’s easy. I made good money, etc.” And I’m like, “No, no way. I did the hard part. I got a successful company. I got to figure out what’s missing.” And I realized I was a good doer.” When I saw other people successful and happy, and I’m like, “Am I broken? Is something wrong with me?” I think I got angry at God and I didn’t even know if I believed in God. It was a really weird self-reflection but really deep and really powerful.

And then I’m like, “Look, I’m a good doer. Why don’t I change my goals? My goals must be wrong. Why don’t I set my sight on becoming happy and becoming a successful business owner?” And I made two life changing decisions that day. Instead of self-medicating, I went for a jog so I went away from my escape, and I met things head on, and I did something healthy for myself, and I made a commitment to myself that I’m going to figure this life thing and this business thing out. That was a turning point in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, you went for a jog, then you just made the firm decision. All right. So, often, in such moments, things are easier thought or said than done. Tell us, what did you have to go do to get in a healthy groove with your responsibilities?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, right around that time, I briefly mentioned earlier that I joined a group of entrepreneurs, and two of the entrepreneurs had just a real peace and calmness about them. And until that part of my life, I’ve achieved a lot but I’d never achieved any peace or calmness. And I got to know them, and both of them went through a really unique program, and I found out about it and I signed up for it, basically, because I know I needed to do something or I was going end up dead.

It was a Master’s in Spiritual Psychology. And when I say spiritual psychology, it had nothing to do with religion. We learned six different psychoanalysis techniques from a place of pure compassion, and that’s the “spiritual” part of it. And we take the assumption that we’re all loving beings, and if we have behaviors that aren’t loving, like we get jealous or angry or sad, which we all do, that’s part of the human experience, we don’t judge it, but we say, “There’s an opportunity for healing.” And we use psychology to go in and heal that part of us so that we are more in line in with our true selves, or our soul, if we choose to believe we have a soul.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you share with us, perhaps, some of the most effective practices, interventions, approaches that came forth from that?

R. Michael Anderson
One thing we had to do was, we call it history of loving, so we start with a genogram, which is a family tree, but then we do the family tree, but then we mark down all the alcoholism, the substance abuse, divorces, enmeshments, re-marriages, etc. So, it’s like a whole map of your family.

R. Michael Anderson
And so, once we did that, and there’s a way based on a book called Family Secrets by John Bradshaw. There are ways to follow it up. And, for me, I go after my father’s unresolved issue. He goes after his own father’s unresolved issues. So, my grandfather, his dad, was a failed entrepreneur, multiple marriages, alcoholic. My dad was a failed entrepreneur, multiple marriages, alcoholic. I was getting divorced, alcoholic, and owning a business, so my story wasn’t written yet.

But, Pete, just to see the patterns so obvious in my past, in a way, I knew that, but once I wrote them down and saw how specific these patterns were, it really stopped me in my tracks.

So, then the question is, “I know what the pattern is. How do I heal it?” So, in this case, what I did, and, again, this was over a little bit of a period of time with some great guidance. My father was, when I went through this, about 10, 12 years ago, he’d already been passed away for over a decade. So, what I did was I wrote a letter from my younger self to him, and then I wrote a letter from him back to me on his behalf.

R. Michael Anderson
And just to give you some context, my dad, he had a corporate job, and then he started his business when he was married to my mom and had me and my sister, and the business didn’t go well. And as the business didn’t go well, he started to drink more and more, and disconnect from my family, and just not be available. And then they got divorced, he left, and he really wasn’t in my family much after that at all.

And I know, intellectually, he didn’t leave because of me but I realized it deep down, like, there was unfinished business. And so, I got into this really, I guess, meditative place, and I wrote a letter to him. And the letter said, “Dad, can you help me understand? I really am confused because we had the family with my mom and, Amy, my sister, and it seemed like we’re doing okay, but then, all of a sudden, you left.”

“You never told me you love me. You never told me you’re proud of me. And I don’t understand, is there something that I did wrong? Is there something I could’ve done? Is there something? What happened there? Why weren’t you affectionate? Why didn’t you give me love the way I was looking for? It was really difficult growing up without you and having no relationship. I just wanted to understand more about it.” And it was very, very emotional getting that out.

And then, again, me writing the letter from my dad to me was amazing because he wrote, he said, “Hey, Mike, you don’t understand. I love you so much. I’m so proud of you. And I love your sister. I even love your mom so much. But the fact is, I’m the male, I’m supposed to be the breadwinner. I’m supposed to provide for my family, and I failed in that.”

“And as the business went bankrupt, and I got into tax problems, etc., I just was so disappointed in myself whenever I was around you and the whole family that I figured you all were better off without me, and so that’s why I left because I knew you all were better off without me. And I’m so sorry, and I love you so much, and I’m so proud of you. And I see what you’re doing now, and you’re really amazing.”

And, after that process, I quit alcohol and drugs, Pete, because I had a belief that, deep down, I had this belief that my dad didn’t love me. And I realized in this process, which I know is the truth, in my heart, that he did love us so much that he actually made, I think, a pretty stupid…it wouldn’t be what I ask for, but he made a sacrifice, and he thought he was doing what he thought was best for the family. It wouldn’t be what I chose but he did love us, and he loved us a lot. So, I had a belief that I wasn’t lovable, and then I realized that I was lovable, and my dad did love me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And so then, I’m curious, thinking about how that could be applied in their domains, I suppose it might be we zero in on a wound, a challenge, a difficulty from an earlier time, and then write the letters both ways. Have you seen this manifest in other ways? Is it usually the parents or could it also be to, I don’t know, former lovers, or siblings, or business partners? What else have you seen in application here?

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, that’s a great thing to bring up like that. And what comes to me is that this a lot about unfinished business. And when we have unfinished business, it’s because, internally, we’ve made different agreements, or we made assumptions, or we made decisions. And part of all of us know what that decision is but it’s subconscious so we have to get to it.

So, this two-way writing can get to it, and you can do this two-way writing with your ego, with a part of you that feels scared, and maybe you do two-way writing with the part of you that feels scared. And maybe you do two-way writing with the part of you that feels scared and then Superman, or somebody who has great empathy or compassion or strength, so there’s some creativity that can go into this. but what you really want to do is make sure you’re in, like, I want to say meditative, like a very present state, maybe you go to somewhere special to do this because your mindset, your presence is going to really affect whether this is successful or not.

And then really find out, and the big question is who you have to talk to, or what needs to be healed or released, and then that can be a really, really therapeutic process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Thank you. Okay, Michael, so you did that exercise and it was super powerful. What happened next?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, that’s what people do. Some people ask me, like, “How would you describe your…?” and this is how we’ll bring it back to people in their careers and their leadership, for example. If people ask me, “How would you describe the changes that happened during that?” because I went for the Master’s and then went another two years over this, four years.

And I say that, “I really got to know who I am, know, like, and trust myself,” because I realized back then I was so insecure and I really wanted to be liked, and I wanted to be respected, I wanted to be looked up to that I was spending all my time being the person I thought people would like and trust and respect, and all those things, which wasn’t authentic, and it was taking a lot of my energy to be that person.

And then through this process, I really got to understand, know who I am, and like who that person is, and have the trust to show that. And when we talk about leadership, and this is why I work with leaders, and the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is once I started applying what I learned there, and knowing who I am, and bringing them to my businesses, because one time I owned three, two in California, one in Singapore, then we really started to thrive.

We’re on the Inc. 5000 list a couple years in a row, we won the Number One Best Place to Work, and I won Social Entrepreneur of the Year. That was externally but internally I was finally having fun as a leader because I was bringing my full self to that leadership position. I was showing people who I am and what my values are, and then people would get energized by that.

And then I was creating great relationships with them. We’re creating great value to our clients. And we were giving back to the community, which I think we all want to do but sometimes we get off track. And that switch, Pete, was so instrumental to my life that, if I had to summarize it, that’s really what I help leaders do now in the workplace and in their personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. So, the core there is you have a deep, clear, profound conviction of who you are and you’re able to just sort of step in that, and own it, and feel it, and love it, and believe it. Is that accurate?

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. Yes. And I’m actually okay when I make mistakes or if people don’t like me because it’s like, “Look, here I am. You may like me. You may not like me. You may like part of me. You may not like part of me.” And sometimes there’s parts of myself that may not be ideal but I have this massive compassion for myself, and this acceptance, that sort of trumps everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Massive compassion and acceptance. Okay. Well, so now you got the Master’s Degree, you did some exercises with the letter-writing. Can you illuminate for us, are there any other particularly powerful interventions or things you did that got you to that place?

R. Michael Anderson
There’s tons. I’ll give you a quick bite-sized one. So, I learned what a judgment is, because a lot of people don’t. They heard the word judgment but they don’t really know what that is. And the way it was defined to me is a judgment is assigning a positive or a negative thing to something, so I judge something is good or I judge something is bad.

Now, the Buddhist, they say there’s only one truth in this world, that something is, it is. There’s no good or bad. That’s something that humans assign. And the example I give is, say, I’m dating a girl and she breaks up with me. And the only truth is she broke up with me. I could judge it as bad, like, “Oh, I’m a loser. Nobody likes me. I’m never going to get married,” or I can judge it as positive, “Oh, great. She wasn’t the right person for me anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But those are both human-created, the plus or the negative. The only truth there is that it happened.

And I come from a bit of a judgmental family, to be honest, so once I realized what a judgment is, and let’s say it’s just healthier not to judge, I realized that, through the work day, my life was just one big judgment to the next, like, I’d have a good call with a prospect, and be, “Oh, my gosh, we’re going to get this deal.” And then somebody would come in, and they’d say, “Hey, I’m going to take next week off,” and I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, how are we going to survive without them?” It would just be a real rollercoaster of emotions the whole day, and so by the end of the day, I’d be exhausted.

So, for about two months, I really, really worked on just looking at things as they are, just like data, like not this plus or minus, and it was amazing, Pete, because, the end of the day, I would have so much more energy because I wouldn’t go on this rollercoaster, but my decision-making skyrocketed because I wasn’t making emotional-based decisions. I was just looking at what happened and taking it in a very calm, collected, rational way. Because, I don’t know about you, but all my bad decisions were made when I was in a real emotional state.

And by just keeping that level head, and just realizing any time I’d say, “Oh, this is bad,” or, “This is good,” that that’s a judgment. Look, we’re humans, we’re actually, in a way, naturally make judgments here or there. But the more that we can be aware of that, and just take things as information, that can help our mental health, that can help our leadership abilities, that can help our decision-making, and that can help how people will see us as a calm, cool, collected person.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, for everybody, if I can give one message for everybody, it’s just to give yourself a break. I know, Pete, we talked before. I know there’s a lot of high-achievers and people that are really driven listening to this who want to get ahead in their career and everything, and chances are, you’re like me, listener, that you’re your own hardest critic, and just give yourself a break. You do so many amazing things. Just focus on them. And when you mess up here or there, because you probably will because you’re a risk-taker, just give yourself some slack.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. So, a guy named Viktor Frankl, you’re familiar with him, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, Man’s Search for Meaning.

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. And for listeners out there, he was a psychiatrist during World War II, a Jewish one in the concentration camps. And he learned, he says that the only thing that people can’t take away from you is the ability to choose. So, we all have the ability to choose, and nobody can take that away, and that’s the most powerful thing we have. So, him just reminding me that we have the power to choose is something that I find very inspiring.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Well, what they’re finding now is our DNA can be changed. So, what that means is when we live, for example, a more conscious life, that changes our actual DNA. So, there’s this whole thing about how we’re wired. Nothing is that hardwired, so we can change anything we want in our personalities and our life.

Pete Mockaitis
So, are we talking about epigenetics here?

R. Michael Anderson
Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Which I think is one of the coolest things ever. So, can you expand on that just a smidge in terms of, like, what’s a thing we might do that would change how a gene is expressed in a means that is helpful for us?

R. Michael Anderson
Whoa.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the name of the gene, the letters, and the numbers.

R. Michael Anderson
I’d just say something like pessimism. I think a lot of us can be brought up in a very pessimistic environments and households and things, and we can be very critical to ourselves and others. And with work, we can be rationally optimistic. So, I don’t mean painting a blue sky when things are difficult. Also, finding the good in things and focusing on everything that we have.

Our grandparents came out of a lot of world wars and things, and brought up in depressions, and that went to our parents, so I see just a lot of criticalness and negativity. And I really believe that, with some mindfulness, we can really change ourselves to really live a much more peaceful positive life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

R. Michael Anderson
Favorite book. I like Mindset by Carol Dweck is one. That might be one you get a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think Mindset is excellent. And maybe, since you talk a lot about this kind of thing, I want to give you a follow-up on Mindset. Okay. So, I think listeners may have heard it before. Hey, you’ve got a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And the fixed mindset is you believe that your strength, your skills, your abilities are locked in, like, “I’m smart,” or, “I’m not smart,” “I’m good at this. I’m creative,” “I’m not good at this. I’m not creative.”

Versus growth mindset, “Hey, I’m always capable of learning, growing, developing.” And all sorts of good things happen when you have a growth mindset in terms of the effort you exert and all that. So, I’ve heard that a few times, and I’m all about it. What I find interesting, though – help me out with this, Michael – is sometimes, even though I know that’s true, and I want to have a growth mindset, I have fixed mindset stuff creeps in a little bit, like, “Ugh, I just suck at this.”

And so, my alarm bells go off, like, “Oh, no, that’s wrong, Pete. That’s not the most productive helpful thought,” but, nonetheless, it pops up. What do you do in those moments?

R. Michael Anderson
It’s interesting because I was trying to think, because I caught myself. The funny thing about this is we can learn and understand, and learn it really well, but then there’s parts of our life where it hides, and then later you’d be like, “Oh, I’m doing it there.” I was trying to think if I found a couple lately. And the big thing is awareness.

Pete, I think once you have awareness, you’re halfway there because it’s where these things hide, and we don’t know they’re there, and that’s why it’s so hard. We’ve got to keep looking at ourselves. But, again, we want to learn at ourselves compassionately, not, “We’ve got to fix ourselves. We’ve got to fix ourselves,” because that’s just gets us right back to the non-compassionate view of ourselves, and back in that downward spiral.

I’ll give you an answer, Pete. You want to laugh at yourself. That is it. You want to chuckle, and be like, “Ah, there I go again. It’s going to happen again because you’re never going to be fixed to that.” But if you can take it with a little bit of humor, and instead of, like, “Gosh, darn it. There it is again,” you can just be like, “Huh, there it is again,” and bring a lightness to it. That’s, by far, the best thing you can do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can you share with us a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

R. Michael Anderson
My favorite tool is going to be simplistic, but just listening and listen to your intuition. As a leader, I work almost exclusively with leaders that have teams, and I’m telling them, if they’re talking more than a third in a meeting, even if it’s a one-on-one meeting, they’re talking too much. And, over the years, I feel that I’ve become very wise, and the wise is my intuition, and I access my intuition by listening and really tuning into people.

And we’re all back-to-back meetings, and we’re all running around, but when I can take some time out, and if I have a big meeting, I’ll go for a half an hour walk before it, for example. So, when the meeting starts, I can be tuned in. And I like to be the person in a meeting that doesn’t say anything through an hour meeting, except for 10 minutes left. I say the one question, or the one statement, that brings everything together. I want to be that person that brings the powerful question or statement out, but potentially says the least.

And we do that by really listening and tuning in. And so, that’s my tool, is really tuning and just listening to everybody, seeing what’s not being said, maybe having the courage to say what’s not being said, but to do that in service to really getting the team forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

R. Michael Anderson
Again, it’s going to be common, but meditation. That’s probably changed my life. It’s the single thing that’s changed my life more than anything because it helps everything slow down. And when I don’t meditate, I realize how grouchy I can get and easily upset.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say meditation, what specifically are you doing?

R. Michael Anderson
Well, I’m a big silent meditator so I go on silent Buddhist meditation retreats, more normally twice a year. But every morning, for 22 minutes, I kneel down on a meditation cushion and do silent meditation. Guided meditation is good but nothing beats silent meditation. And people say, “Oh, I can’t meditate.” I’m like, “I don’t understand.” And they’re like, “Well, my mind wanders.” I’m like, “Well, that’s like saying ‘I’m trying to jog but I get tired.’” It’s like that’s going to happen. That’s a byproduct of trying to quiet your mind.

And the goal of meditation is not to have a quiet mind. It’s to have the awareness. I meditated this morning, and probably 30, 40 times I caught my mind wandering. I just brought it back to center but that’s the muscle you need to strengthen, it’s that one that has the awareness and brings it back to being present. So, I think there’s a lot of confusion about that, and guided meditation is good but I don’t think it’s a replacement for silent meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

R. Michael Anderson
So, once they hear it two or three times, they get it, but your relationship with yourself, your leadership mirrors relationship with yourself. So, your leadership mirrors the relationship with yourself. And what that means is all I really help leaders do is work on that relationship with themselves, make them really understand who they are, make them know, like, and trust that person, make them have compassion with that person.

And leadership is a lot about putting yourself out there, and it’s really about trusting yourself. You have to have this inner confidence. Confidence isn’t that you know things are going to work out, whether you know it all. The confidence is, no matter what’s going to happen, that you and the team are going to be okay, and you’ll solve it, but that means being okay with the unknown. And the only way you have that is to really trust yourself.

So, what I do is I work with leaders to develop that relationship with yourself, because, if you talk about impostor syndrome, that’s not having faith in yourself. And, look, when I say we all, pretty much everybody runs through impostor syndrome. I even get it every couple of weeks, but the thing is I have the tools now that I know what to do with it. So, it’s about coming back to yourself. And if you don’t have trust in yourself, it’s about building that trust up with the relationship. So, your leadership is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.

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

R. Michael Anderson
So, my name is RMichaelAnderson.com. And my new book, Leadership Mindset 2.0 is at LeadershipMindsetTheBook.com.

Or if people find me on LinkedIn, drop me. Tell you what, if anybody finds me on LinkedIn, R. Michael Anderson, and says, “I’m connecting with you from Pete’s podcast,” I’m going to send you a free gift. So, there you go.

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

R. Michael Anderson
Yeah, I tell you what. Everybody listening, think about how you were five years ago, like, as a leader. Look at where you are now, and compare yourself five years ago. Chances are you’re calmer, you make better decisions, you trust yourself more, you have better confidence, etc. Now, that just goes to show you that leadership can be learned. It’s a learned skill.

And so, if you want to progress in some of those areas, whatever it is, you got to work on them, and that’s really what I like teaching. So, it’s that confidence, it’s that presence, it’s having difficult conversations earlier and better. It’s all those helping people overcome their impostor syndrome and step into their true powerful selves. All that stuff is learnable.

So, just like we talked about, epigenetics or whatever, set your sight, if you want to move ahead in your career, and that’s what’s stopping you, go out and learn those tools.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Michael, thank you. This is a lot of fun. I wish you much luck.

R. Michael Anderson
Pete, you got have me back in another six years.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it.

Jan 04
0

925: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Feeling Guilty with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Aziz Gazipura explains the dangers of people-pleasing tendencies and shares actionable steps for overcoming it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The massive costs of being a people-pleaser
  2. How to not feel guilty when saying no
  3. A surprising strategy to build your discomfort tolerance 

About Aziz

Dr. Aziz is a clinical psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on social confidence. In 2011, Dr. Aziz started The Center For Social Confidence, which is dedicated to helping everyone break through their shyness and social anxiety.

Through confidence coaching, audio and video programs, podcasts, a detailed blog, and intensive weekend workshops, Dr. Aziz has helped thousands of people all over the world increase their confidence and lives out his mission: To help every person who is stuck in shyness liberate themselves to pursue the relationship, career, and life they have always dreamed of.

He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Candace and son Zaim.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Aziz Gazipura Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Could you kick us off with a dramatic tale about the dangers of people-pleasing?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah. Well, I don’t need to make anything up here. And it’s the kind of, like all good dramatic stories, it’s a slow build, where maybe it’s like imagine a character in a movie where they go out and have some drinks, and they really like it, and it just seems like a good time. And then, flash forward many years later, and they have the shakes in their hands because they have to have a drink of alcohol. And that’s actually what niceness is like, or people-pleasing, specifically.

So, you basically make a choice to not be yourself in order to smooth things over or be liked or be accepted. And maybe a classic tale would be you did it when you were young, you did it to fit in at school, you did it to fit in with family. And that was not all horribly off-kilter then. But then I talk to, man, dozens of people every week, where now they’re 37 or they’re 43 and they’ve done pretty good, like inauthenticity and fitting in works. It’s this somewhat adaptive strategy, but it works the way that that drink worked to take away your anxiety, but it doesn’t actually give you what you really want.

I was just speaking with a woman just two days ago, she’s about mid-40s, successful in her career, has a family, has a husband, and feels incredibly lonely, and doesn’t even really know what to change out there anymore because, “I have all the things.” And she’s lonely because no one, not even her husband, really knows her. And that might not sound bad. Some people might hear that and say, “I’ll take the family and the money and the career, and then I’ll be fine.”

But actually, when you get there, and you don’t feel like anything out there is going to change it, and inside you feel profoundly lonely, it’s a story of a lot of suffering. And it’s a story that hundreds of millions of people live out, and feel like they’re the only one, but they’re not.

Pete Mockaitis

So, can you make that all the more real and clear for us? To feel like no one really knows you, what might be some examples of the false impression others on the outside have in contrast to the reality that is within?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, the impression people have on the outside is what you learned will keep them close to you, and it might be different. And I call them the roles that you’re going to play. So, at work, you have a certain role that you play, “I need to be confident-sounding, in charge, certain with my partner. I need to be pleasing. So, what do they want me to be? I’ll agree to things that I think that they’ll want me to agree with. I’ll focus on the things that they want. We’ll talk about what they want.”

“I also know that they don’t like it if I’m irritable, or if I’m sad. So, I’m going to downplay that or hide that.” And that’s true for friends as well, “I got to be up. I got to be on. I don’t want to be boring. I don’t want to be a sad sack. I don’t want to bring people down. I don’t want to burden people with my feelings, and my woes, and my problems.” So, therefore, at work, you’re going to be that way. And inside you might feel nervous, you might feel insecure, you might question yourself but you don’t show any of that.

And that, people can tolerate a certain amount of inauthenticity at work. But then where it really starts to get to them is when they can’t even be themselves around their friends, their loved ones, their family. You got to hide it and pressure yourself, and so you can’t reveal that you’re feeling sad. You can’t reveal that you feel like something is missing. You can’t reveal any of these things. And that’s where the loneliness comes from for people.

And it might not be these big dramatic things, like, “I can’t reveal that I’ve secretly wanted to leave.” Even just, “I am feeling sad today,” and it’s so simple but it’s a world of difference when you have to keep it all inside, all hidden. And sometimes people, really good pleasers, and I know this because I lived this for many years, you’ll even hide it from yourself, “I’m not sad. Everything’s okay. I just have a stomach ache. I just am tired.”

And it becomes this vague thing that you don’t even know. You don’t even know where you are in all of it because then it’s scary to know what that is and maybe share it with others.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, this loneliness, what are the knock-on, follow-on consequences of that?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s a variety of different studies around loneliness, but loneliness is pretty much associated with all negative health outcomes and a much shorter lifespan. That’s like the big hammer, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yup, dying.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

And quality of life, but sometimes people hear that, and like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about everything in life. Too much peanut butter kills you. You got to live.” But actually, not only is it a shorter life, but let’s just talk about the quality of life. And there’s the longest study in the history of human psychology, it’s decades. It’s been going so many decades that they’re now the second generation of people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Waldinger.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

This is the one done with Harvard students, yeah. And the short version is, it’s relationships. That’s what makes us feel good in life, that’s what makes us feel happy in life, that’s what protects us from hard times in life. And not just you got somebody in your house that’s your roommate. No, we’re talking about confidantes, real relationships, people where you’re in life together.

And so, the loneliness, the cost is you don’t have that, or you have a very limited amount of that, and that is the biggest determiner of true success, which, for everybody, I don’t care what they value in life. True success for everybody is actually to feel rich inside, like feel full of success, of love, of meaning, of resources. And so, you can have external success and feel empty inside, and not have the thing that we all really want, which is those real connections with people.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

But other than that, it’s great that we should just keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, can you give us a ray of hope then, an inspiring tale of a people-pleaser reformed?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, the ray of hope is people-pleasing is not who you are. It’s a pattern that you run. And that’s fantastic news because any pattern that you run you can change. It’s an active process, it’s a verb, like walking or eating. And so, you can put down the fork and no longer be eating. You can put down the people-pleasing pattern and no longer be pleasing. And you can still be very loved by more people than you could ever need to be loved by. And you could be more boldly yourself and actually enjoy who you are and stop trying to be somebody that you’re supposed to be for others.

And I think this is the biggest risk, this is the leap of faith, and that’s why I think people who read my books or work with me because there’s some part of them that says, “That sounds a little too good to be true. You’re saying I can be me, and have love, and belonging?” And the good news, the ray of hope is absolutely yes, and it’s on the other side of that risk, the other side of what we fear, which is, “If I’m really me, everything is going to fall apart, and no one’s going to love me.” But that’s the whole source of the problem to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, warm, loving relationships, longer life, higher quality of life, that sounds swell. And then your organization is called the Center for Social Confidence. Tell us about what that confidence picture looks like on the other side of the people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Well, there is the outer layer, which I think we all may be focused on at first, which is, “I want to be more confident.” What does that mean? Well, that means I can be more bold, I can walk up to people and talk to them, I can initiate conversations, I can network with people, I can just walk into a room and not feel afraid of what people are going to think, I can really just be myself. That means more power in leadership, and influence, and impact.

You can share your idea more directly, more broadly. You can advocate for something. You can advocate for yourself, for your ideas, for your team. Also, that shows up in relationships and love. You can go approach someone that you really are drawn to, who you really want to spend your time and your life with, and you can let them actually see and know the real you. So, those are the outer observable effects.

And then the inner effect as a result of that confidence is that you feel like you belong in this world, and that sense of insufficiency, not enough-ness, and all the scarcity, there’s not going to be enough love, there’s not going to be enough people, like, that dissolves. And that is worth way more than all the promotions, and all the dates, and all the stuff but sometimes we have to start with that outer stuff, and then realize, like, “Wow, me just really feeling that peace inside, that is worth its weight in gold.”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that does sound absolutely delightful, yes. So, lay it on us, how do we pull this off? I imagine it’s easier said than done.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yes. So, the good news and the bad news. The good news is this is all possible, the ray of hope stuff we were just talking about. The bad news is you probably are going to feel like you’re going to die on the way there. That’s all. But it just feels that way because, let’s rewind, what is people-pleasing? People-pleasing is a survival strategy that you picked up that’s based upon an idea, a conclusion, that’s not even true. But the conclusion you came to is, “I’m not okay as I am. There’s something just me as I am being totally lovable, I don’t buy it.”

Maybe someone told you that. Maybe you interpreted that. Maybe someone wasn’t there for you. Maybe you were abused. I don’t know, but there is some messaging that you picked up, and you’re like, “Wow, just me being me is not enough, and so now I have to do something. And what I need to do is I need to observe you, and if I can keep you happy, then you’ll probably stick with me. And I got to observe if you’re upset, and make sure that I don’t do the things that upset you. I got to see what makes you smile, and make sure I do more of those.” And now a pleaser is born.

And so, it’s rooted in fear, in the fear of abandonment, fear or not surviving, “Because I’ll be left, I’ll be lost. So, now I’m going to live that out for much of my childhood but as a personality, as a whole life strategy.” And so, why it feels like you might die is because it triggers this kind of fight-flight survival response inside to challenge you, which is why most people don’t.

But if you get up to that, like, fed-up point enough, and you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to keep living this way. All right, let’s take the leap,” you don’t stay in dying forever. You don’t actually die but it feels very ungrounding because there’s a sense of certainty and familiarity in that way of being, and you are going to challenge that. That’s why most people don’t just say, “Oh, I’ll do it,” and then actually execute on it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then what does the execution look like in practice? What are the step-by-steps? Do I just go give people a piece of my mind, Dr. Aziz, “Let me tell you what I really think”?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

So, I have two books on the subject. One is called Not Nice and the newer one that just came out is called Less Nice, More You. And I talk about the pendulum, where people who have been overly passive and pleasing at some point can swing, “Now, I’m going to let the world have it,” and that’s okay.

Maybe that’s a phase to go through but, ultimately, there is a set point that’s much more effective. And I think the key steps from a higher level are these. Number one, you have to decide that you no longer want to be so people-pleasing and nice. And that might seem like a strange step, but it’s like, “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” Well, no, because many people have a lot of their identities wrapped in, “But being nice means I’m a good person, and I don’t want to be a bad person.” No one wants to be a bad person.

And so, the first thing we need to do is we need to upgrade our understanding of being people-pleasing is not the same thing as being kind, or generous, or loving, or whatever it is that you actually value as a human. And that people-pleasing is more of a compulsion and not a choice, and so you have to be giving, you cannot say no, and that can be very detrimental.

So, someone is struggling, you take an extra hour to support them seems kind, right? The nice person and the people-pleaser doesn’t have that choice, so they could be being eaten up inside. They’re all stressed.

Pete Mockaitis

Eaten up inside and bitter, they’re like, “This jerk is always hogging my life.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

“I got too much on my to-do list.” So, now you’re talking about resentment. So, the compulsion part of it, the “nice” person feels like they have to. And any time we feel like we have to do something, and we don’t want to in that moment, that’s a formula, a human formula for resentment. So, now we’re going to start that.

Now, the kind choice is like, “Okay, this person wants this. Do I want to give it? Does it feel right to give it?” And it doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. Your kid is sick or something is happening, and you’re just like, “You know what, but it feels right, it feels like I want to do it.” Then you do it, and you say, “I want to give it.” Then we won’t feel resentment.

Kindness, true kindness leaves a glow inside, you’re like, “I feel good about that.” Whereas, when we’re like, “I couldn’t say no. I mean, look at them, they need me.” And the nice person likes to create this elaborate world in which everybody is super dependent, like, “They would die without me. They would be, oh, my gosh, if I left this partner, or this boyfriend, girlfriend, they’d be devastated for years,” and they don’t even see how it’s a little bit of a…it’s a way that we’re trying to get some sense of significance, perhaps.

The truth is that people have many ways to meet their needs, and you’re just one of them, and you’re not the only one. So, yes, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That’s the stew of resentment that can form. And so, back to this first step of, “I need to decide I’m not going to be so nice and pleasing” is actually an important first step because, otherwise, we remain in this pattern where this is the only way to be, this is the right way to be as a good person, everything else is bad. And then we will perpetuate that indefinitely.

Pete Mockaitis

And that decision, boy, it just seems like the distinctions and the commitments are so myriad in terms of the boundaries that we’re down with, in terms of “I am committed to doing this and being generous or loving in these domains. And I’m not so much down to do these other things.” It really kind of feels like we got to go, behavior by behavior, or relationship by relationship, when  we determine what that decision really means in practice.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yeah, that’s a great point. And, yes, it is, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is it can be distilled into one question, which is an extremely liberating question but it also, if you’ve been living a people-pleasing life, can make you very uncomfortable. And the question is, “What do I want? In this situation, what do I want?”

And even just asking that can push a lot of the buttons for someone who thinks that that’s selfish, “Your life shouldn’t be about what you want. That’s the problem with the world, is too many selfish people.” But actually, we’re just talking about asking the question. You might still choose to say, “Well, what do I want? I want to not take care of my son.” “Well, he’s five and he needs someone tonight. So, you’re going to find a way to work with it.”

So, it doesn’t mean you instantly just, “I do whatever I want. I don’t even care about anyone.” It’s like, no, but you start that behind that question is not just the data of the answer. It’s actually caring about yourself just like you would with someone you love, “What do you want, honey? It doesn’t mean you get everything you want, but I want to know. I want to know. Maybe we can work with it. Maybe we need to compromise here. But what do you really want? And what do I really want?”

I was just talking with a friend earlier today, and he has some friends visiting out of town, they said, “Hey, we want to come have some dinner with you.” And he’s like, “Oh, that sounds good.” And then they’re like, “Oh, also, we’re flying out somewhere the next day. Can we spend the night at your place then we’ll go to the airport?” And he said, “Well, let me talk to my wife and we’ll make sure.”

So, he’s about to go talk to his wife, and he’s like, “Hold on a second. Before I even talk to my wife, what do I want here?” And that’s such so small, we could just steamroll right over the moment and go on with our lives, and that might seem so trivial but, man, you add up those trivial moments, that’s your whole day, that’s your whole week, that’s your whole life.

And you might say, “Well, that’s horrible. How could you not have your friends stay the night? They need a favor. What a bad friend.” Ah, now we’re looking at the roles of the rule of friend, and many people have extreme rules, “You must always say yes to a friend.” But instead, if you tune in and say, “You know what, it feels kind of, I don’t know, confining.” And he got curious about himself, “Why? Well, I was just hoping to have the one evening a week that I can spend with my wife, one on one. She’s so busy. I’m so busy. I just don’t really want to give that up.”

So, now all of a sudden, we discover that the saying no there is actually a loving act for himself, for his wife, for his relationship, so we’re prioritizing something else. We would not even discover that. Now he’s trying to please his friends, so he says, “Yes,” and then he’s feeling maybe his wife is going to be upset with him, so he’s trying to please her. And then the whole evening, he’s just anxious and secretly resentful, which is a disaster.

So, yes, we want to go, day by day, decision by decision, slow down and start to really ask, “What do I want here?”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And what’s interesting is by surfacing that, and if you do make the choice, and maybe, well, one, I think that can generate kinds of creative options that you didn’t even think about to start with, it’s like, “Hey, you can come over between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. and, yeah, it’ll get you to the airport on time.” And so, there it is. So, you had your cake and eat it, too.

Now, sometimes you can’t but then I guess if you do choose to make a sacrifice on behalf of another, I think you can do so all the more eyes wide open, it’s like, “I am choosing to do something for this other person, knowing it’s inconvenient for me, but because I value this relationship more than I value binging Netflix, or whatever I was in the mood to do that evening.”

And then, as you said, there is sort of a glow. You can feel good about that choice. You made a values-driven decision and chose that which is good in your value system above that which is expedient, and you did so, knowing full well the consequences that could flow from it.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, I love that nuance. And sometimes people hear this, and they think you’re going to become this very stingy person, not just with money but with your time. And that’s actually not the case. It is very much more intentional and you’re linking it with your values. My younger son, who’s eight, we eat a pretty similar breakfast every morning. And one of the ingredients is from downstairs, and he doesn’t like to go downstairs because he’s afraid of whatever, monsters. That’s what lives when you’re eight years old, that’s what lives downstairs in the basement, is monsters.

And so, there was this time when we were trying to help him face his fear, but that one was just so kind of just an uphill battle, and I was like, “You know what, as a loving act, I’m really okay just going downstairs to get the thing. I’ll help him fight his fears in other places, and he doesn’t need to tackle every fear because his dad freaking is obsessed with confidence.”

So, I just decided that, and it’s this kind of sweet act of generosity. He’s not going to be eight years old forever. And when he’s a big hulking teenager and could care less about going anywhere in the house, then that’ll be a sweet memory.

And so, you can actually be really loving and generous in all these different ways. It’s just not coming from this pressure that you have to or else. I think that’s the biggest freedom.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, walk us through the next steps.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

All right. So, you’ve decided, “I don’t want to be nice,” and then you start to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Then the next step is going to be you do the things that are “not nice.” And that might be saying to your friends, “Hey, I’d love to see you. You guys can come. We’ll get some dinner. It’ll be awesome. And then you’re going to be staying near the airport or something. I want to have the evening to myself with my wife. It’s our one night and I really want to preserve that.” And it’s, “Oh, my gosh, so you’re saying no in that situation.”

Yeah, another not nice thing might be to inconvenience someone by asking them for something, “Can you help me with this?” or, “Can you do that?” There’s disagreeing with somebody, “Ooh, that’s real unpleasing of you.” So, maybe you have a different opinion, it’s relevant to something in business, a decision, whereby it feels high stakes and it’s important to share it.

It might even be just a different idea or preference that doesn’t even seem that important to share but you just share it instead of smiling, and saying, “Oh, yeah, me, too. Me, too.” You’re like, “Yeah, I actually like the person that you seem to dislike. Hmm, that’s interesting.” So, whatever it is, it’s just a small smattering of the potential behaviors of you being more you, more authentic, more real, more bold.

That’s all the “not nice” behaviors. And every single one of those is going to produce probably some level of anxiety at first because that’s me being testing out what could happen, which is going to be some sort of calamity, “If there’s conflict, the relationship is over. If I say no, the person is going to never do anything for me ever again. If I ask for what I want, they’re going to hate me.”

So, we have these dramatic predictions, and we test them out. And it’s a form of exposure, really, like behavioral training where we need to do the steps, which tends to bring about the discomfort. And then there is another step about working with that, but I’ll pause there to see if there’s anything you wanted to ask about this step.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. That’s good. And what’s funny, though, is the asking for help, we think that’s not nice or imposing or burden, yadda, yadda, but, in reality, when I’m asked for help, I often am delighted to be trusted, relied upon, to be confided in on the matter, and I really like it. And I guess not all the time. Some things are like, “I really don’t want to do that.”

But I think that’s interesting that sometimes these not-nice behaviors are, in fact, what people really value. Maybe some people don’t get people who disagree or challenge them enough.

So, it’s interesting what we think might be not nice could, in fact, be just what the doctor ordered on the other side of the table.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and that highlights something really important, which is this strategy of people-pleasing is not a very well thought out effective model of human relations. It’s like, “This is the best predictors and most intelligent, socially intelligent model I can…” No, it’s a cautionary model. It’s, “Hey, any of those things might be a problem so don’t do any of them. That person might respond well to that but they might not, so just, no, don’t.” So, it’s not a very sophisticated or intelligent interpersonal model. It’s just safety-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. You got some more steps?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. So, after you spoke up, you did the thing, and you’re freaking out inside, then it’s time to do the work, which is to upgrade something inside of yourself. That’s where the real transformation is going to occur. People think the real transformation comes from the action, which is part of it, but then we have to upgrade, otherwise we just keep beating our head against the wall. And you can leave that situation, you say, “Oh, I feel so guilty I told them no. I’m so bad.”

If you just grind yourself through that meat grinder for two days, and then you come out of it, you haven’t probably really learned anything. And so, the next time someone asks you for something, and you think, “I should say no because that’s being less nice,” then you might remember the meat grinder, and you’re like, “I don’t want to do that.” And so, then you probably just go back to the old pattern.

So, to really change, after we say no, and then all that stuff starts to come up, then we get to upgrade our map of relationships. And there’s one that I really love, which is I call your bill of rights, so what you’re allowed to do, and the rules, basically. And so, when you feel really guilty, you can examine it, and say, “Wait a minute, what rule did I break? What did I do that was so bad there?” “Well, you said no to people.” “Okay, so what’s the rule?” “You should never say no.” “Well, to who? My friends?” “Yeah, you should never say no to your friends’ requests.”

“Okay. Wow, that’s a pretty extreme rule. Is that how I’m going to live my life? Are there some downsides to that one?” And then we upgrade with much more healthy, and nuanced, intentionally chosen approaches to life, rules for life. So, for example, you might say, and this is where the bill of rights is, “I have a right to say no to requests.” And that might sound like a simple statement, but if you really start to believe that and live that, that’s a whole different life, not just in terms of the behaviors but how you feel on a daily basis.

I don’t think we can totally upgrade these in a vacuum, where we just sit down with a sheet of paper, and we upgrade our bill of rights, and then we venture forth into the world, and everything is perfect. No, we kind of have to go through this process where we take the action, we feel bad, and then that’s the motivation to say, “Whoa, it’s time for something different.”

But if we do it, and we change, and we upgrade, it’s like a step-by-step. It’s almost like pulling out the faulty coding of the pattern and putting in a new coding, new software, that runs so much better. And it’s the software of more authenticity, more boldness, more actually being you in the world. And it turns out to work a lot better on your system than the nice people-pleasing software.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s interesting, it seems like those exposures, those reps, really do build up over time when you work through those steps. I suppose I am a people-pleaser myself, and I’ve just sort of gotten clear that I’m disappointing people every day. Like, there are people, maybe this very minute, Dr. Aziz, someone might be unfollowing this podcast or unsubscribing from the Gold Nugget newsletter, which I don’t recommend taking those actions. But, nonetheless, they are taken.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Someone out there. There’s a loose cannon out there.

Pete Mockaitis

By the hundreds, by the thousands, and so this happens. And so, what’s empowering is to just, for me, as I just sit with that, it’s like, “Yeah, I have displeased someone, and that’s okay. I have not sinned, I have not violated my values, I have not been, I don’t know, fill in the blank: selfish, greedy, lazy, any number of things that seems to kind of be at the core of a lot of this, is we have these value judgments associated with what you’re calling rules. It’s, like, “I feel bad, therefore, I must’ve done something bad. So, I’ve done something bad. I’ve broken a rule. What was the rule? Oh, wait, that rule is kind of ridiculous. Huh.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and there’s what I found, and one of the reasons why when I work with people, and the main ways that I work with people, is in a group environment is because we can identify that rule, and think, “That seems kind of intense,” but it has such momentum of history that I find a lot of this is almost like we’ve been running a propaganda campaign inside of ourselves for 20, 30, 40 years.

And when you’ve heard something for 40 years, it doesn’t matter what’s true or not. It’s hard to challenge. I was working with a gentleman in the program, who has had a hard time, even his relationship with his wife, he’s saying, “This is what I’d like to do on a Saturday.” “I don’t know if I want to do that. Here’s what I want,” like basic stuff.

And so, it almost felt like for the first couple of months he’s in the program, he was, “Hey, it’s okay for me to ask for what I want.” And in some part of the lecture, I’m like, “Of course. Of course.” And then he looks, like, around the room, and like, “Is it really okay for us to do that?” And we need to hear that, we need to get reinforced from outside.

And, hopefully, it’s just reinforcing some new beliefs that are just more sane and healthy. And I think that’s really a key thing to come back to, is, “Hey, is the way I’ve been living really serving me? Is it serving others? Is it really? If I’m getting burnt out, and hurting inside, and experiencing all these mind-body issues, and pain, and illnesses, like is this really how it’s supposed to go?” And I would challenge that, I’d say, “We’re not meant to live and help others at the expense of ourselves.” I think there’s really a beautiful, a much more abundant, win-win way of going through life.

Pete Mockaitis

That is beautiful. And I’m wondering if you recommend starting, if it feels scary, starting big or starting small? Like, “Asking my wife what I want to do on a Saturday,” in that example, is it that you recommend that you have, I mean, a small request might be…?

I guess I’m thinking small might be like you can give a lot of advanced notice. Like, let’s say on a Tuesday, you say, “Hey, honey, I think it’d be really fun on Saturday if we got lunch at Jimmy John’s.” Like, “Okay, that’s an inexpensive restaurant. It’s four days notice. It’s lunch, not dinner. It doesn’t seem as big, primetime of a meal.” So, I’m wondering, is your professional advice to start with some of those smaller, non-pleasing moves or requests, or to go for the bigger ones right off the bat?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

I would say both are beneficial and it’s going to be based upon your discomfort tolerance, which, by the way, is akin to a muscle that is worth building, and you will build it by doing this. And so, if one is going to just completely blow you out of the water, because our goal here is sustainable. Think of it like strength training over many months, and so you don’t want to go to the gym and just blow yourself out where you can’t work out for three weeks. So, maybe you do the lighter weight at first, then it’s a little easier, and that’s great.

You start to build momentum, and success builds on success, so you have a couple wins, and you’re like, “Well, that didn’t go so bad, so I think that’s a completely valid approach.” And if you want to go faster, you feel like, “I have been in this cage for so long that I’m just ready to do whatever. I got to get out,” then you might feel excited and exhilarated as you really test the edge quicker. But I don’t think there’s one approach that’s better or worse.

Pete Mockaitis

You say discomfort tolerance is a muscle, when we work that muscle doing exactly this. If people-pleasing is a diagnosis, that is apt for you. Are there any other pro tips you have on building the discomfort tolerance muscle? I’ve been into cold plunges lately, so if you can justify me that I’m not a weirdo, and this is actually super beneficial to all sorts of elements of my life, I’ll receive that, Dr. Aziz. But, is cold plunges one of the activities that increases the discomfort tolerance muscle? Or what are some of the other top prescriptions here?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

As a matter of fact, the cold plunge is.

Pete Mockaitis

Thank you for that.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s actually cold showers for clients that I work with. And I, about six to eight months ago, invested in an actual cold plunge to take my cold to the next level. And there’s a lot of physical health benefits to them but, honestly, the biggest draw for me is that discomfort tolerance. It’s a training, it’s a visceral training to go into the uncomfortable every day, or however often you do it.

And the cool thing about discomfort tolerance is that it actually does generalize. So, if you took a cold shower that morning, and then later in the day, there’s an opportunity, someone at work is sharing an idea, and you have something you want to add to it, and you’re like, “Well, actually, I think this. I don’t know if they would think that that’s disagreeing, or I’m not sure.” And that back-and-forth kind of hesitant energy, when you’re in the cold shower, about to go in the morning, you’re like, “Uh, should I go into it?” you’re like, “Ah, let’s just…all right, here we go.”

And whatever that is, that ability to go into discomfort, and then withstand the discomfort, it translates because the circumstance might be totally different, one seems physical, one seems social, but on a physiological level in your nervous system, discomfort is discomfort. And when you increase your capacity to do it, you can actually transfer it.

And so, yes, physical feats of discomfort, whether it’s a cold plunge, or just going doing, you know, people will take the elevator instead of the stairs when it’s two flights of stairs. There’s just this unconscious addiction to comfort that we’re living in. So, finding ways, I’d say once a day, on purpose, you could go do a wall sit where you sit against a wall with your back against the wall, and your legs, or your thighs are at parallel to the earth. Hold that for 60 seconds and you’ll be quivering.

Is that going to make you ripped? No, but it’s saying, and it’s all about the framing of it. So, right before I go into a cold plunge, I remind myself, “This is going to make me stronger.” So, it’s framing. It’s the same thing with the wall sit. I’m not doing this just to build muscle or something. I’m doing this to say, “Hey, I can do things that are uncomfortable,” and that will exactly translate over.

And then, of course, there’s dozens of opportunities in your interpersonal social life. And how do you find them? You just know. We all have a radar going on all the time, and saying, “Is that going to be comfortable or uncomfortable?” And most of us are using that radar to say, “Well, if it’s uncomfortable, then go the other way.” And what we actually want to do is you don’t have to go crazy with this. It’s all in the dose. You don’t need to go insane on your dose of medicine here, this discomfort medicine. But a daily dose, even if it’s small, will radically accelerate how quickly you can make these changes in your life.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, this one I like, this is Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably tolerate.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Ah, favorite has got to be The Boulder Study of Back Pain of 2021. There’s a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon where they talk about it, but the Boulder Back Pain study was done to compare back pain treatment, treatment as usual, medications, physical therapy, and then also something called pain reprocessing therapy, which is treating the back pain with the mind and emotion, which has been fascinating for me with my own history of back pain and chronic pain, as well as nice-people developing pain.

There’s a whole chapter in the book, why it’s not nice about that. And so, randomized, controlled trial, gold standard evidence that we can use these mind-body approaches to not just reduce but completely transform back pain is revolutionary for the chronic pain world, and something I’m really excited about getting out into the world in a big way.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s one I’m reading right now that I really enjoy, it’s called Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, and I’m finding it really refreshing for how to reclaim your focus and your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s the best and the worst, it’s the cold plunge.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes, go to DrAziz.com, that’s D-R-A-Z-I-Z.com, and the goal is for there to be a wealth of resources for free. So, there’s a podcast on that page, under the Resources tab. There’s also a mini-course, a video mini-course called “5 Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence” also for free. I have a YouTube channel, you can get a link there as well from the Dr. Aziz’s homepage.

So, lots of resources for free. And then if you want to take things further, we have some training courses, and I also work with people in a 12-month life changing yearlong program. So, however far you want to go, I’d love to support you. And if you just want to start with the free stuff or get a book, that’s a beautiful way to really learn that there’s a pathway. There’s a proven pathway out of this stuff, and I’m here to help as many of us as we can to get across that.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Whatever is going to make you the most awesome at your job is also the thing that’s probably either scary or uncomfortable. It’s, like, really practicing that boldness and facing what we fear will not only produce just beautiful results in your career but will also make you feel good at your work, you’ll feel way more engaged.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Dr. Aziz, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and minimal people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Thank you, Pete. What a fun and interesting and dynamic interview. Really appreciate it.

Dec 07
0

921: Overcoming Failure and Achieving the Impossible with Astronaut Mike Massimino

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Former NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino shares powerful insights on how to push past failure and achieve the impossible.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 30-second rule for dealing with failure
  2. The trick to getting along with people you dislike
  3. The most important lesson Mike learned while in space

About Mike

Mike Massimino served as a NASA Astronaut from 1996-2014 and flew in space twice for the final two Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. He became the first human to tweet from space, was the last human to work inside of Hubble, and set a team record with his crewmates for the most cumulative spacewalking time in a single space shuttle mission. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is an engineering professor at Columbia and an advisor at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

He is a frequent expert guest and has been called the real-life astronaut who inspired George Clooney’s role in the movie “Gravity.”

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Wildhealth. Take control of your health and get 20% off at wildhealth.com/AWESOME with code AWESOME.
  • The Management Muse podcast. Sharpen your leadership skills with Cindi Baldi and Geoffrey Tumlin

Mike Massimino Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Mike Massimino
Thanks for having me, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mike, I’m excited to be chatting. You are a bona fide astronaut, and you spent some time in the Hubble Space Telescope. And my hometown Danville, Illinois has a hero we’re quite proud of, Joe Tanner, who also worked on the telescope. Tell us, you know each other.

Mike Massimino
Oh, yeah, Joe was a little senior to me but he was very helpful and a good mentor and instructor. He really was great. I call him St. Joseph because he was such a nice guy. He’s a religious guy but he was also just a good guy and was very thoughtful, a really good guy. You should be proud of him, Pete. He’s a good guy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad, yes. Danville, Illinois, we love to be proud of Joe Tanner and Dick Van Dyke.

Mike Massimino
Oh, he’s another good guy. I met him a few years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, good.
Mike Massimino
Yeah, I met him. We both were on the same talk show together, and I can’t remember which one it was. It was in L.A., and I got to meet him in the green room and spent some time with him. He’s just a really nice fellow.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. You are plugged into all the cool kids but I think my listeners must know an awesome tale from your time in space.

Mike Massimino
So, I’ll just give you a little bit of background. I got a chance to service the Hubble Space Telescope so that was my job as a space worker on both my missions. So, an awesome tale from space, I would say, for me, what I still think about almost every day, Pete, is the chance to look at our planet and enjoy the view.

And the reason I get to think of that every day is not only the view itself that I saw, I thought I was looking into an absolute paradise, is that I have a different appreciation for the planet now. I think we’re living in an absolute paradise. We should be very happy every day we have a chance to be here. And I got that impression looking at our planet from space. It just looked like it was a perfect place for us to have. We’re very lucky to be here. I felt like I was looking into heaven.

And so, I think about that all the time. But being around the planet, you get a chance to engage it, and enjoy its beauty whether you’re looking at buildings, or people, or a mountain, or clouds. It truly is an amazing place, and we should try to appreciate it every day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Mike Massimino
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now my wife will make sure I ask you. You actually had a medical disqualification but you trained your very eyes and brain to see better. How is that even possible? What did you do?

Mike Massimino
Well, the third time I applied to be an astronaut, I got an interview. The first two times I was just rejected outright. The third time, though, I got an interview, and then I was medically disqualified. I failed the eye exam.

I didn’t know if LASIK existed back then but they certainly didn’t accept it, or they didn’t accept any kind of medical procedure to improve your eyesight, and you had to see pretty well without glasses and contacts. Well, all these rules are changed now so it’s not an issue any longer. But back then, in the mid-1990s it was still a pretty strict requirement to see well without your glasses.

And I was left with no options, really, it seemed. So, what I did was look into it a little bit, and I found out about vision training where you can do exercises and try to train your eyes to focus beyond what they’re looking at, which is kind of interesting.

So, if we focus at an object that’s put in front of us, we can see that clearly. And two feet, we change our focus and we can see that but, eventually, you run out of room, and what you try to do is look beyond that object and try to focus on something beyond that object, and then what you’re looking at kind of comes into focus.

So, it’s a bit of a training not just for your eyes but your brain as well. And I found an optometrist in Houston that specialized in that, and she helped me out, and was able to pick up a couple lines on the eye chart so I could at least apply again. I was able to get medically qualified again and, at least, I was able to submit another application. Once you’re medically disqualified, that’s it. You’re done but I was able to get it overturned.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And as I’m imagining this in my own mind’s eye, I’m hearing a Rocky montage music as you’re doing vision training.

Mike Massimino
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Was it like that each day?

Mike Massimino
No, it wasn’t really very physical or Rocky with the physical. No, it wasn’t that. It was more like, I don’t know, some kind of strange evil eye I was giving somebody, it seemed like it, kind of staring out. I don’t know what it would’ve been. More like a Psycho movie or something but not Rocky. Rocky music can get involved in other things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if we cut the scenes together and just so, and put the right soundtrack behind it, yeah, I think that could be an inspiring portion of your movie.

Mike Massimino
Maybe so.

Pete Mockaitis
The Mike Massimino tale coming to big screen.

Mike Massimino
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so you got a book here, Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut’s Guide to Achieving the Impossible. That sounds cool. Could you perhaps kick us off with a couple stories, maybe one inspiring, an inspiring victory and a disappointing failure of those who set out to achieve the impossible?

Mike Massimino
Well, it’s interesting you mentioned that because I think every victory was preceded by a failure. So, to me, in my life, Pete, they seem to run together. So, the first of those, I mentioned I’d been medically disqualified and things weren’t working out with me but I went through vision training and then I was able to rectify that and get selected as an astronaut, so that was a victory. It ended up as a victory.

And I think that things like that, and also failing my qualifying exam at MIT the first time I took it, I did miserably on it and failed, and my advisor talked to me afterwards, and said he didn’t think it was worth my while to try again. They typically give you a second chance at this six months later for that exam. And I thought about it and decided I did want to give it a try, even though it seemed unlikely. And I went back and told him what my decision was, and he said something like, “You know, Mike, if one can learn to live with indignities, one can go far in life.”

And I think it was his way of saying, “If you can get knocked down and beat up, and get up again, you can go far.” And I looked at what I had done to fail, I got cooked in the oral part of the examination. It was a written part followed by the next day, it was an oral exam, and I wasn’t good at thinking on my feet. And some of my friends, I reached out to my friends about it, they knew what happened, and I told them what happened, and the suggestion was, “Well, let’s put together a little team to help you.”

And my friends who had passed the exam in the past, I’d buy them cookies on Friday afternoon, and they would drill me at the blackboard in a small conference room at MIT, and I got much better at answering questions on my feet. And so, I was able to retake the exam and come out with a victory. And I think that those lessons, that and other things, I think anything worthwhile I think is difficult and it doesn’t work out the first time.

And once I got to be an astronaut, every one of us who was in my astronaut class had some sort of adversity to overcome because it’s not an easy thing to do. You just don’t sign up to be an astronaut. It’s a pretty long and could be grueling process to get in there and faced with lots of obstacles. But once you get in, you’ve accomplished something by getting in, but you haven’t done anything yet, Pete. You just showed up for work.

And so, now I think it’s that same grit and determination that get us to the goal that is required to make us successful once we’re given the opportunity. It’s no time to slack off. And so, you talk about success and failure, I was faced with that throughout my training, and also in space. I was repairing the Hubble Space Telescope in my final spacewalk, and it was a very complicated repair, but there was something I was going to do, which was remove a handrail which was blocking my access to this panel that I had to remove to get to a power supply.

It was a very complicated spacewalk, the most complicated, complex one we’ve ever tried. And I made a real bonehead mistake. So, this is where the failure is. I stripped the screw when removing that handrail and we didn’t have a backup because it was so simple. We had a backup for everything else but not this but they came up with a solution.

The handrail was loose at the top. I had gotten through the screws at the top off. There’s just one stuck on the bottom, and the solution was just to tear it off. Now that might seem simple but it took about an hour to come to that solution. And I was able to comply with that, rip off that handrail, and continue with the repair.

So, I think, I would say, each major victory or success I’ve had was always preceded by a pretty bad failure. And in the way I recovered was getting help, both when I was taking my qualifying exam, I got help. I got help from an optometrist to get over the medical problem I had, and then I got help from the mission control center.

And I talk about that in the book where you’re not in this alone. When you need help, reach out to your mission control center, whoever that is. Know that help is there for you somewhere. Reach out. People know you need help. And also, be that person that other people can come to when they need help.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that. That’s a fantastic principle right there. And I will think of you every time I strip a screw from now on, which is semi-often actually, Mike, I’m like, “Don’t beat yourself up.”

Mike Massimino
Happens all the time, man. Well, it happened at the wrong time, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Out in space.

Mike Massimino
It really happened. I looked out, when I first realized what I had done, I took a look out, bent down to see what I had done, and I didn’t see a hex head hedge screw anymore nor a piece of metal. And I kind of leaned out of the telescope, I leaned myself out, I was in a foot restraint. I leaned out and looked at the planet, and we were over the Pacific Ocean, Pete, and I couldn’t imagine a hardware store to get to. So, it’s one thing when you strip a screw at home, it’s another thing when you’re in space when that happens but, luckily, the team came through for me with a good solution.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious if you drive screws any differently now as a result of that one experience.

Mike Massimino
I kind of do but I’ll tell you the other one. So, those were big screws, they were big bolts, and we didn’t expect them to be a problem. But one of the next things I had to do was remove 111 small screws that were really tiny, and those we were more concerned about stripping than the one that was easy. So, it certainly changed the way I behaved from then on for the spacewalk, and I try to remember that at home, too. You can create a lot of problems and a lot of work for yourself by moving too quickly, so you try to learn from your mistakes.

One of the things I talk about or write about is that if you’re going to make mistakes, it’s okay to be upset and give yourself 30 seconds of regret, beat yourself up internally, call yourself names, don’t vocalize it because you’ll scare people but leave it to 30 seconds and then move on. And that’s something that helped me because you’re going to make mistakes. You don’t mean to but it’s going to happen.

And then the other thing to remember when you’re dealing with a problem is it could always get worse. No matter how bad it is, you can make it worse. And sometimes we make one mistake and we follow it up by trying to rush and do better, and we make another mistake. And now we’ve got a problem B to fix before we can go back to problem A.

So, that’s what I try to keep in mind, particularly during my spacewalks, and when I’m working on stuff around the house. You make a mistake, 30 seconds of regret, and move on. Try to solve it and then don’t make it worse. Give yourself a chance to fix one problem at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s paradoxically very comforting that idea of, “Oh, I can make it worse” because, in a way, well, one, it’s just absolutely true. I’ve just lived that. And, two, it’s just sort of a potent reminder of when you feel powerless in those moments, you do have power. And even if you don’t feel much hope that you can make it better, you have the power to make it worse.

Mike Massimino
You do. No, you absolutely do. And when I made that mistake, I mentioned earlier, I even thought about, “How could I make this worse? Well, I could break something. I could do something to my spacesuit. I could lose the tools I was going to need to fix this.” You’ve got to be really careful. Things float. Objects can become permanent satellites if you’re not careful with them and you don’t use the right protocol to tether things and to keep an eye on things.

And I saw that happen. I’ve seen guys lose one tool, and then have to go get a replacement, and lose that one as well, and now you’re really cooked. So, I’ve noticed these things, and you’ve got to be careful because once you do one thing wrong, if you try to rush to make up for it especially, guess what’s going to happen, Pete, problem number two is going to happen. It will get worse so you’ve got to be careful. Get help. It’s time to slow down and get help when that happens.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’d love your take here – is 30 seconds better than zero seconds or 10 seconds?

Mike Massimino
I think so.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Mike Massimino
Because you need to be regretful. I think. And I think 30 seconds, to me, is a good enough time that you can beat yourself up. You don’t want to ignore it, “Ah, I’ll leave it in the past.” See, the thing is people keep telling me, “You’ve got to leave it in the past. Move on from your mistakes. Learn from them and move on.” But it’s hard to move on, and I tended to beat myself up for a long time when something would go wrong or I’d make a mistake. It could go on for a week of regret, like, “Oh, man, I really messed that up. It’s terrible.”

But you’re not getting that time back. And in space, you can’t afford to check out for even a minute. You got to stay engaged. And so, that’s a lesson that I learned because I had to. In space, I just could not check out. I’m the guy out there doing the spacewalk. I can’t wallow in the misery. I have to stay engaged. But the value of it is for what goes on, on the planet, all the time when we make mistakes, and that same principle applies.

And I think it’s okay to be remorseful and be regretful, and say, “Holy cow, that was a terrible stupid thing to do. I can’t believe I did that,” and rant. Let yourself have it for 30 seconds, and then you got to get back in the game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Mike Massimino
Leave it in the past. Flush it. Leave it in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve got some other perspectives here, such as cultivating a bank of good thoughts. What is this tool about? And how does it help us?

Mike Massimino
All right. So, for that one, I was told a rule or something to think about by my friend Alan Bean, who was the fourth person on the moon, fourth person out of the 12 to walk on the moon. And he told my entire astronaut class that the key to being a good leader and a good teammate is to find a way to care for and admire everyone on your team.

At the same time, we often, to solve complex problems in today’s world, we work together with a diverse group of people, because if everyone thinks the same way, you’re not going to solve major problems. You need people who have different perspectives. Sometimes that can lead to friction and you might find that you don’t like somebody, like, “I just can’t admire that person. I don’t…and I can’t…”

So, if you find someone like that, Alen went on to explain, don’t think of it as you don’t like them. Think of it as you don’t know them well enough, and take the time to get to know them, and find something that you care and admire about them. And I kind of added onto that concept with this bank of good thoughts that you mentioned, that I think it’s important to, when you find someone you don’t like, and you take that time, you got to find… you think you don’t like.

It’s not that you don’t like, you don’t know them well enough. You really don’t. Because people who are in your family or people that are in your workplace, they’re there for a reason. Their name wasn’t picked out of a hat. They have something to add and you have to spend a little time. And when I’ve done that, I’ve always felt so much better about things.

One of my best friends I had a very bad impression with when I first met him, another astronaut, named Andrew Feustel. I thought he was kind of loose and didn’t care, and I just was wrong. And I took the time to get to know him, and we’re great friends. I spoke to him yesterday for about an hour on the phone. A really good friend of mine. And my first impression wasn’t great but I don’t know what he thought of me. Probably not great either, but we took the time to get to know each other, and we really love each other. A great guy. A really great friend.

And I think it’s important, when you find that thing that you like about a person, that you care, that you find that common ground, something that they’ve done that’s good, when people help you, when they show up for you when you need them, when they do some kind act somewhere in their life, or whatever it is that you have about them, that you found out, or that you’ve experienced with them, you have to put that in the bank of good thoughts because you’re going to need to take a withdrawal.

When you start feeling badly about that person, when they do something that might aggravate you, don’t act right away. Take a beat and go get a withdrawal from that bank of good thoughts, and have that good thought in your mind, “Yeah, this person might’ve done this that I didn’t like, and I need to address it, but before I go and send that bad email, or confront that person in an angry way,” because that’s not good.

Go to the bank of good thoughts with that good thought and have that in the forefront of your mind, and say, “Look, I really care about this person. We might have this misunderstanding. I’m going to have to deal with it, talk to them about, to clear the air, but I’m going to go in there with that good thought.” And I think that’s a good way to do it because one bad experience, one bad thought, one bad email, one final to handle, whatever it is, that can destroy a thousand good things.

So, one bad thing, that’s worth a negative a thousand, and to make it up, you’re going to do a thousand good things to make up for it, I think, with a relationship. And that’s what we’re dealing with when we’re working on a team, is building those good relationships with our teammates.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say bank of good thoughts, I am actually imagining specific statements associated with specific people. Is that fair? And could you give us some examples of how these are articulated?

Mike Massimino
Like, for example, with a family member, my brother, for example. He has come through for me on many occasions. And if we have an argument, or something is going on, I try to remember, “This is one of the most important people in my life.” You might argue as siblings or you disagree about things, but he has been there for me when I really need him, and I try to remember that as best I can.

With my crew mates, I try to think of the times where they helped me when I needed them, when I was counting, when I was having some trouble with a concept or with training, and they were there for me and stuck by me. I try to think of that. Or, with my friend Drew that I mentioned, he was a really smart guy, very mechanically inclined, would help me fix all kinds of things. So, that personal relationship where I appreciate his help, but also, I admire his ability that he was a great spacewalker and a really good astronaut is what I came to find.

I do talk about one case where there was one person we were working with on our team, an engineer, that we were having some difficulty with, and he just seemed strange. That person was just like, “I don’t know about this guy.” And people would discount what he would say because they thought he was a little bit different. But I took the time to get to know him, and realized, “This guy is really smart, and he was really dedicated, and he could probably be doing anything that he wanted to in his life, but he decided to dedicate his time and his career to the space program, and, more specifically, helping us be successful on Hubble.”

And so, the feeling was, “Well, it’s a strange idea, whatever he was talking about,” that might turn people off, I try to think of, “Wait a minute. This guy is a really smart guy. Maybe he’s not communicating his ideas well. Let’s give him a chance. Let’s remember what’s his value. Let’s not devalue people. Let’s remember why they’re here and what they can do for us, and what they can do to help the team. Not just for output, what they can do to help the team.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super. And do you have these written down somewhere?

Mike Massimino
No, they’re in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Mike Massimino
Maybe I should write them down, Pete, but it’s in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m just imagining in the heat of battle if you’re really ticked off at somebody, you might have a hard time remembering the good thoughts you have about them.

Mike Massimino
Just take them, Pete. You can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now, I’m thinking about professionals who, in the course of their jobs, are feeling maybe a little bit timid or scared, in certain contexts. Maybe it’s before a big presentation, or taking on a risk, or making a career change, or something. You have faced some uncertainties, some potentially scary things, and found the courage within. How do you think about courage and stepping up and enduring discomfort well?

Mike Massimino
Whenever you’re nervous, I think that that’s okay. I think that that shows that you actually care about what you’re doing. And if you’re not nervous, it probably doesn’t mean that much to you. If you’ve got an assignment or something to do that seems scary or makes you nervous, I think that’s a good sign. I think that you should try to use that to help you get ready. I don’t think being scared is good.

There’s times in my life where I was scared and I tried to shut that out because I couldn’t afford it. The thought that went to my mind during one of my spacewalks were, after I made that mistake, I was going to have to do some things I was a little bit uncomfortable doing. I had to go and translate, I had to move as a spacewalker in some areas that were going to be difficult to do that in, and I was scared, like, “Oh, my gosh, what happens if something happens here?”

And I realized being scared is not going to help. I had an airplane incident one time, we had a hydraulic leak in the airplane, we might have to eject, and right away you know the fear or scared, and I realized, “Being scared is not going to help me here. I’m trained. Let me follow the procedure.” And I found that you can use that nervousness, an anticipation to get ready and make your plan.

And then when it’s actually time to face whatever it is you’re doing, I think thinking about is a lot worse than doing it once you’re actually in the heat of the moment, whether it’s making a presentation, or delivering whatever it is you need to deliver to a group, or whatever that might be, whatever that event is, that now it’s time to relax and trust, and trust your gear, the tools you have to help you, whether that’s a computer, or a parachute, or whatever it is you’re using that day. In my case, it was some of those things, like getting in an airplane and trusting a parachute is going to work if I need it.

But trusting your gear, your tools, your computer, whatever it might be, trust your training. Your name wasn’t picked out of a hat. The reason you’re given that assignment was for a reason. And whatever you did to get ready, you can consider as training. And then you’ve trained yourself to be ready for it, and you’ve shown yourself to be worthy, so trust your training.

Trust your team is the third trust. Life is rarely a closed book test. It’s usually an open-book test. You can get help when you need it. So, remember that there’s a team behind you to help you when you need them. And, finally, trust yourself that you’re going to be up for the challenge. So, I think that’s what helped me face really scary things that made me nervous. It was just trust that, “I’m ready for this. It’s okay. I can handle it. I have a team behind me. I have the right tools. It’s going to be okay.”

So, that’s what helped me face some of these things, that, even looking back on, I’m not sure how I did it, but that’s how I did it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, what seems really wise there is you feel fear coming on, and you just decide, “That’s not going to serve me. I put that aside.” Is it just like that, Mike? Is that all there is to it?

Mike Massimino
Well, not necessarily. It depends on the moment you’re in. Let me give you another example. I don’t like heights. And I was on an exercise out in the Canyonlands where we were doing a lot of rock climbing and rappelling and hiking at heights, like very close to the edge of a cliff, and walking up very steep rock formations, and it was driving me nuts after a while.

I just didn’t like it. And I realized I had to figure out a way to get through this because we were out there for two weeks. And right from the get-go, I think I probably dealt with it for an hour or two, but after a while, I was like, “I don’t think I can do this for a couple weeks.” And I reached out to one of my teammates, Jim Newman, who was my spacewalking buddy, and we were out on this adventure together with the rest of our crew. And I said, “Look, man, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just don’t like this.”

And he says, “All right. Let’s try to take care of this.” And during one of our breaks, we kind of went around the corner, we were having lunch on a rock, more or less. We’re pretty high up on a mountain in an incline. And we walked around the corner so no one would see us around the corner of this rock, and there was a steep face there, and he held my hand, and we walked around it. And then, he let go and made me move around by myself.

Then he made me jump up in the air just to get the confidence that I was okay. So, I think that there are times where you need to think. If you’re in a situation where you’ve been trained to handle the situation, like, I think a lot of times you are, something goes wrong, and hopefully you’re able to handle it, or you’ve been trained to handle it.

So, it depends on the situation but there were times where I was, like, “I can’t be scared right now.” Being scared is a luxury. If you have time to be scared, I think that maybe things aren’t as bad as you think. But I felt like, in those few occasions, like in the aircraft and when I was spacewalking, when something came up, I needed to work the problem. Just being scared was not going to help me. So, yes, I did turn off.

But in other cases where, like the example of being afraid of heights and being scared of the situation I was in, I had time to try to solve that. And it wasn’t just a 10-minute experience. I was going to have to be out there for a couple weeks so I dealt with it in a different way. But I think it’s okay to feel these things. It shows that you want to be better at them when you’re nervous but the scared part of it, I think that could affect our ability to think at a time where we need to think.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And as you’re sharing your story, it sounds like, I guess, psychologists would say, “Well, that’s simply exposure therapy,” and how that works. And I’m reminded of Bryan Cranston has a lovely autobiography, it’s called My Life in Parts, or A Life in Parts. And when he was doing theater stuff, he was scared of the heights associated with the lights and stuff.

And so, his director said, “Okay. Well, here’s how we fix that,” just very matter of fact. “I’m going to hold this ladder and you’re going to climb up to the top.” He’s like, “I’m scared.” “Yes, I know.” And he’s like, “Now, you’re just going to hang out there for a while.” He’s like, “Yeah, but I’m scared.” And it’s like, “Yeah, it’ll go away eventually.” And sure enough, it did. And that’s how you solve that.

Mike Massimino
Yeah, I would avoid that. The other way is to avoid height. I try to avoid it wherever possible, but sometimes you’re in a position where you need to deal with it. And I found myself in those situations where I had to do it. I just had to, “There was no choice. This is the way home. You have to deal with it.” And that’s when you got to figure out a way to face it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’d also love to hear, in the unique environment that is being out in space with just a few teammates, that’s a whole another flavor of environment in which teamwork skills get put to the test. Can you share, are there any nifty principles or takeaways that you believe can be handy for typical working professionals as well that you’ve picked up from that environment?

Mike Massimino
I think what I learned at NASA pretty much from the get-go was the importance of the team success and that you can’t do things alone. And that was taught to me very early on. My first week at NASA was mainly administrative stuff where we all got to know each other a little bit, we’re in a classroom where we get briefings about different things but we were going to start the training in the second week in earnest.

And one thing that I wasn’t looking forward to that I knew was coming up was that I was going to have to pass a swim test. I did not like the water as a kid. I never learned how to swim very well but we were told, and when we were accepted as astronauts, we were given our packet, after we get the phone call, saying, “You’re in,” which was a great phone call. We got a package of info, and in that there was, in the cover letter, like the second paragraph, it said, “Please practice your swimming skills because you’re going to have to pass a swim test in order to go to water survival training with the Navy.”

And the reason we need to go to water survival training is we’re going to be in an ejection seat aircraft, we eject over water, we need to be able to survive in the water until the help can get to us. But we’re on the Space Shuttle, also there’s a bailout mode. We might end up bailing out if you can’t land on a runway, if you’re having trouble during launch and you can’t make it to orbit, you can’t come back and land in the United States, and you can’t make it over to the other side of the ocean to southern Europe or to one of the landing sites in southern Europe or North Africa, you end up in the ocean.

So, in order to do our jobs, is we had to go through that training. And then to do that training, we had to pass the swim test. And I practiced as much as I could but I still was worried about making myself look like an idiot in the water.

And so, at the end of that first week, we’re about to go home for the weekend, and Jeff Ashby, one of the pilots from the class before us, was our class sponsor, kind of leading us through our training. And he said to us at the end of that day on Friday, he said,
“Who are the strong swimmers in this class?” and a few people raised their hand. And then he said, “Who are the weak swimmers, more important? I want to see a show of hands.” And I raised my hand as a weak swimmer. And he said, “Okay, anyone that didn’t raise their hands can go home. But the strong swimmers and the weak swimmers are going to stay after class. We’re going to arrange a time to meet over the weekend at a pool, and the strong swimmers are going to help the weak swimmers with their swimming because when we go to the pool on Monday, no one leaves the pool until everyone passes that test.

And so, that setup for me, that in trying to accomplish something, it’s a team goal. And individual success is great but if you’re good at something, your job is to help your teammates. And if you’re having trouble with something, your job is to admit it because you don’t want to hold back the rest of the team. And that set the bit of my head of what it was going to be like, that we’re depending on each other.

And so, when we got to space, and you’re talking about conflict, I felt like space life brings out the best in people because you knew that you had to depend on that person in order to be successful on the mission. You can’t do it alone. And that also, for me, what was helpful, was that, what we talked about earlier, when a conflict did arise, you’re like a family member, you love each other, but you might argue once in a while with your crew mate, and you’re going to have conflicts and disagreements, and that’s not good but they’re going to happen, and you need to deal with them.

But I think it’s always good to remember why you like that person, and why they’re important to you, and try to address the problem with that in mind, with good intentions, and not being mean. And that’s the way we did it. So, we would have a conflict or a problem with somebody, we always raise it and always honestly, and usually it was better to clear the air. Don’t let it fester because it just gets worse for the team to do that.

And if you look at it from the perspective that, “I’m speaking up about this for the sake of the team, for the sake of the mission,” then it’s not necessarily just a personal problem, it’s, “Hey, I think this is something we need to talk about because I think it’s going to hurt our team.” Then I think everyone can get on board with that if you think of it that way.

One of the things you mentioned, too, about people not wanting to speak up or raise something, one of the things I learned was the importance of speaking up, whether you’re having an issue with someone, or you made a mistake, or you have an idea, and oftentimes it’s the new person that has the best ideas. And so, I think that people should speak up, and I think it’s up to leadership, though, to foster that sort of culture where, if someone speaks up and admits a problem they’re having, they’re not going to be punished, or a mistake they made, they’re not going to find retribution for it. They’re going to be helped, and we can learn from their mistakes.

And so, if not, if people don’t come forward with the mistakes they’ve made, then people are going to repeat them, and that doesn’t always work because sometimes these mistakes might be something that could hurt you. If you’re in an airplane or a spaceship, and you do something wrong and you get away with it, you want to tell people about it because the next guy might not get away with it. So, it’s important to have a culture, I think, where those concerns can be raised.

And also, good ideas. A new person has a fresh perspective on things, and a lot of times it’s the new person that has the right idea. In my case, doing spacewalks, one of the spacewalks I was assigned to in my first flight had been done before but it didn’t always go well. It took a long time and it’s hard to align one of the scientific instruments on the Hubble. And I had a suggestion of a tool that could help us align it, and I put that forward, and the team liked it, and we designed it, and that’s the way we installed the instrument using the tool that I envisioned.

Now, for every good idea I had, there was probably 20 of them that stunk, but you don’t want to squash the bad ones or the ones you think aren’t good. You want to hear them out because you don’t want to lose that creativity. You want people to keep coming back with their ideas. So, I think leadership needs to set the tone that people can bring up concerns, can bring up ideas, can raise conflicts, so we can talk about it and move on.

And people need to feel that leadership has that culture, is fostering that so they’re not going to get in trouble for bringing something up, that they have the ability to speak up when they feel there’s a need to say something.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. Thank you. Mike, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Massimino
No, go ahead.

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

Mike Massimino
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with the success unexpected in common hours.” What do you think of that? Henry David Thoreau.

Pete Mockaitis
I hope you do voiceovers, Mike.

Mike Massimino
I have. I’ve actually done…I was a voice in the latest Beavis and Butt-Head movie, the voice of mission control in “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.” Well, take that. What do you think of that, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know why it’s not in your bio, Mike. I feel like that should be the first thing.

Mike Massimino
That should be the first thing we mentioned. I don’t know. And we talked about all the space and everything while this other…yeah, I lead with that. I save that one, Pete, if I meet a Nobel Prize winner or some really smart person who’s telling me about something they did, “Oh, I was a voice in the latest Beavis and Butt-Head movie. How about that?”

Pete Mockaitis
I very much appreciate that. Thank you. And could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Massimino
For me, personally, the stuff that I enjoy doing, I teach at Columbia’s human-machine interaction and figuring out what humans can do well, and what machines can do well, and designing displays to help people control things. That’s what I enjoy. But as far as the stuff that’s interested me, that I don’t necessarily participate in but I find amazing, is the astronomy, particularly the stuff that’s come out of the Hubble Space Telescope, and now what we’re seeing with the James Webb Telescope.

I was very pleased to be able to participate in those missions, in the Hubble Space Telescope missions. And to see the science that came out of it, that research I think is amazing because it’s answering some of the big questions of, or trying to answer some of the questions of “Are we alone in the universe? How did we get here? Where do we go after? How did this all happen?” And they’re getting closer to those answers.

And it’s through the use of these amazing telescopes and some really smart people that have been able to come up with those answers, and also coming up with questions that we don’t know the answers to yet. I installed an instrument called the Advance Camera for Surveys that was used to validate the theory of dark energy, which led to a few astronomers getting the Noble Prize in Physics as a result of that discovery, which was an energy source.

The universe is expanding but it’s also accelerating, and they don’t know why it’s accelerating. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like throwing a football, instead of it landing on the ground, slowing down and landing, it goes faster. It actually picks up acceleration, it goes faster. And that’s what’s happening to the universe, and they call that dark energy. So, I think those are the really cool things that’s going on. And I don’t directly work in that research area but I feel like I’ve had a hand in it by fixing the telescope that they use for a lot of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. They didn’t give you a piece of the prize though.

Mike Massimino
No, not at all. No, but I feel like I had their gratitude, that’s for sure. Every time I see one of those folks, they say, “Oh, thank you for risking your life so that we could do our research.” And I’m like, “Thank you for giving me a good reason to go to space.” So, yeah, it’s like a mutual admiration society there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, I want to ask about a favorite book, and if I may steer you in the direction of something physics related. It’s funny, I’ve actually, by fluke of how my credits worked out in high school and college, never taken a physics course, and I feel a little ashamed. And I might just take one myself, like university continuing education extension, whatever.

But that was some fascinating stuff about the dark matter. Are there any cool books you recommend that are very accessible for lay people to wet their whistle and get a great understanding of physics, and maybe less of a textbook flavor and more of a, “Whoa, this is amazing” flavor?

Mike Massimino
Well, my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson has a book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. So, if you’re in a hurry, I think that’s the right book to get, so I would recommend that. And even if you’re not in a hurry, I think it’s a good introduction to all things astrophysics. Another book that I like, if you like looking at the stars, the book that I used, there was an MIT course for observing. One of the books we had to learn the constellations, and I used that at NASA as well. It’s written by H.A. Rey, the guy that wrote “Curious George,” the monkey.

He wrote a book called The Stars and it talks about all the different constellations. But as far as what’s going on in astrophysics, I think Neil’s books are really good. I think Brian Greene is also another good author that writes some pretty cool stuff about what’s going on. He’s more in the mathematical bent of things but I would recommend anything by those two guys.

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

Mike Massimino
My favorite tool has to be a Leatherman. You can almost get anything done with a Leatherman.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Mike Massimino
What I try to do is I try to appreciate where we are in the universe every day. I talked about looking at the planet earlier, I think, when we started. I think we talked about that, viewing the planet and how beautiful it is. I try to do something every day to appreciate our planet, whether it’s just even riding on the New York City subway, looking around at the faces around me, looking at the leaves on the trees, up at the clouds, stars at night, something. We’re living in an amazing place and I think we need to take a timeout at least once a day to just be amazed at how amazing this place is.

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

Mike Massimino
When I was pursuing the astronaut job and got rejected all those times, we talked about the medical disqualification. What kept me going was the mathematical reality that things aren’t necessarily impossible as long as you try. And it might be one out of a million as your chances for success but that’s not zero.

One out of a million is a non-zero number. It’s 0.000 a lot of zeros and there’s a one at the end. And the only way that that one disappears, and you know your probability of success is zero and you will not succeed, is if you give up. Once you give up, it’s game over and your probability of success, you’re not going to be successful. So, I try to keep that in mind and I encourage people, and that’s been told to me as well as something that’s been helpful for people to think about. So, when you try to do something and you know it’s hard, and it might seem impossible, but as long as they try, one out of a million is not zero.

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

Mike Massimino
My website is probably a good place, MikeMassimino.com. You can reach out to me there. There’s a way to contact me through there if you’re interested in doing that. If they’re interested in following me around social media, I was the first guy to tweet from space, so I’m on Twitter @Astro_Mike now, or X now, AstroMikeMassimino on Instagram and Facebook, Michael Massimino on LinkedIn. Those are ways you can get hold of me there.

And if you’re interested in learning more about these things we’ve talked about, Pete, for the folks out there, if they’re interested and they’re either developing their moonshots or succeeding at their moonshots, whatever they’re trying to do in life, at work, or at home, these are things that I’ve learned that have helped me, and I’d love to share them with you, as we have today, but also in the book if they’re so inclined. And that can be purchased just about anywhere, wherever you buy your books, at your local bookstore, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever. It’s available there, Moonshot is available there.

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

Mike Massimino
Don’t give up. Embrace the challenge. Embrace change. Things are constantly changing. I talk about that, too, in the book, and knowing when to pivot. But embrace the challenges, embrace the change, remember you’re not in it alone, and don’t give up. If it’s tough, it means it’s worthwhile. Don’t give up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, thank you. This has been a treat. And I wish you many more fun moonshots.

Mike Massimino
Thanks, Pete. You as well.