Self-Awareness Archives - Page 4 of 12 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Pete, it’s awesome to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so delighted to be chatting with you. And you mentioned you had some laryngitis, but you are summoning the power to chat with us, so I’m really touched. Thank you.

Morra Aarons-Mele
The podcast gods are speaking to me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, hey, it has been 600-ish episodes since our last conversation. So, I’d love to hear if there have been any particularly extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about life, business, mental health, anxiety, or any or all of the above since we last chatted?

Morra Aarons-Mele
The reason why I’m talking to you today and why I wrote my new book, The Anxious Achiever is because last time I talked to you, I had a book called Hiding in the Bathroom, how to get out there when you’d rather stay home, and it was a guide for introverts or people with social anxiety who have big ambitions and big career dreams on really how to build that professional network, really ignore the phrases we all grow up with, like, “Never eat lunch alone,” and, “Crush it,” and all the things that people like me who are introverted and anxious don’t like to do, and really tap into our true selves and how we can sell and execute and start a business as well as any extroverted person out there.

And what I found, as I was talking about that book, I would talk about my own anxiety, I would talk about my decades-long struggle to manage not just my anxiety but also clinical depression, and people would instantly tune in. It was like a valve had opened. And this was before the pandemic even, but people wanted to talk about it.

They wanted a place to feel seen and heard, and talk about how their anxiety impacted their career, their leadership, their success, their dreams, their ambitions. And I pitched a podcast to the Harvard Business Review, I called it Anxious Ambition, and it really meant to get at that interplay, the tension, between those of us who feel almost powered by anxiety. Anxiety is our oxygen, as my friend, Jose, says.

And we only know how to drive ourselves through anxiety. We credit our anxiety with much of our success but it also takes such a toll on our mental health. We think, “I’m only going to get promoted if I work night and day, or if this is perfect, or if I just assume the worst is going to happen, and maybe the best will happen.” And we forget that anxiety becomes a habit and, along the way, we’re doing a lot of things that don’t work for us.

And I launched the show with Harvard Business Review in 2019, and it’s just been an incredible experience to touch base with so many people, including some famous people, who are anxious achievers, or who manage really serious mental health challenges, like bipolar, like obsessive compulsive disorder, or who are neurodivergent and have to work differently, and hear about their journeys and how they manage.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you for sharing that backdrop with us. And so, one takeaway right there, it seems, that by opening up, you didn’t have people shun you, or say, “Oh, I guess Morra can’t handle this opportunity because she’s broken,” but, no, just the opposite. Folks have opened up, and said, “Yes, I, too, am working through some things,” and they feel a sense of connection and are drawn to you and tune into you, and more doors have, in fact, opened up by you being vulnerable and sharing what’s going on there.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I have never, in my hundreds of interviews, met someone who said bad things happened when they opened up. Never.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I interviewed a senior executive at Google, a VP at Google, who ran a huge piece of the tech organization, and he was an early, early voice on workplace mental health, and he said, “I actually think it helped me in my career.” He became sort of a leadership guru, and taught classes on leadership for all of Google. Like, he became a beacon in the organization.

I’ve heard other leaders credit their sort of accepting and managing and living through their mental health challenges as making them not just more successful but just more compassionate, more empathetic, more self-aware, all these qualities that we know people want from their leaders.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful stuff, yes. All right. Well, Morra, that’s encouraging, exciting stuff to hear about that. And within your book, you had a fantastic endorsement by Andy Dunn, a Bonobos cofounder, who said, “Astonishing. Not just for anxious achievers. This book is for any human being who wants to transform their mental health.” I was like, “Ooh, that sounds like me and lots of us.”

Morra Aarons-Mele
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you share with us, maybe, a really cool story of someone who had some fears, some anxieties, or another mental health challenge, and then they found some transformation to that as well as their career?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Absolutely. I just interviewed a guy who, he’s not in the book, unfortunately, but I’m going to tell you his because it’s powerful. His name is Jimmy Horowitz, and to say he’s one of the most powerful man in Hollywood is not an overstatement. He is Vice Chairman for Business Affairs at NBC Universal, so it has about $150 billion market cap, very large company.

And not only that, Jimmy is really the business guy behind a lot of the movies we watch and the shows we watch, and the news we watch. He’s a negotiator. He makes deals. He makes things happen. And I talked to Jimmy about his own transformation as a very, very senior leader, acknowledging that he was depressed. And one of the things that he talked about, because he kept it secret for a long time, like a lot of people do when they’re going through mental health stuff. A lot of us keep secrets of many things at work. Sometimes it’s appropriate to keep that secret. We can talk about that later.

And Jimmy said that when he came clean, when he went public about his depression, he found that he conducted his business with a new more compassionate lens that created better outcomes. He’s a negotiator, like his job is to sit down with the Ari Emanuels of this world, like tough, tough Hollywood people and get deals done. But what he learned through his own really tough journey with clinical depression tuned him in to what his counterparties needed across the table, the outcome that was good for both of them. And that was something he had always tried to do but it was almost like his ears were reopened.

And with this staff, too. He said, “Before, I grew up in a culture where you never left before your boss left.” And doing a lot of work on his own mental health, and also being the executive sponsor of a broader mental health program at NBC Universal, showed him that’s not productive, that’s unhealthy. It’s not good for anybody, and there’s sort of a cascade of change.

And I just love that story because I think that we can all become more resilient, more powerful, when we go through something hard and learn from it, but it has such a powerful upstream and downstream effect on the people we work with, because when we’re anxious, depressed, struggling, we often act out on those around us unconsciously. We don’t even know we do it. And so, when you’re more aware, when you get a handle on this stuff, everyone benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s powerful. Well, so then it sounds like maybe we’ve covered this, but how would you articulate the big idea or main thesis of The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower?

Morra Aarons-Mele
The big idea is that anxiety is a normal human emotion, we all experience it from time to time. It’s part of leadership. In many ways, I joke leaders are paid to be anxious. Leaders are paid to look towards the future and plan for worst-case scenarios and sort of be vigilant. And that if you understand what your anxiety is trying to tell you, don’t run away from it. Don’t even try to control it. Just try to understand and learn from it. You can emerge more resilient, stronger, better at communicating, more self-aware, and also learn to channel your anxiety for when you really need it.

I think many of the people I have interviewed, and myself included, I’m not talking about hugely clinical anxiety where you can’t get out of bed and life is a day-to-day extreme challenge. I’ve been there. I have been there. I have been that person who, literally, cannot leave her bed because she’s so anxious. That’s not the kind of anxiety I’m talking about in the book. I’m talking about the anxiety in the middle of the spectrum that so many of us are experiencing right now because life is really uncertain and things feel scary, and we don’t feel like we have any control. That’s present for us.

When you really take the time to understand how it shows up for you, why, what’s triggering you at work, and how you react, you go through that work and it’s hard work and it takes practice. You then can understand when anxiety is showing up and you should go with it. Like, before a big event, before a speech, before a talk, you want to feel anxious, we need some anxiety, and when to basically tell your anxiety to buzz off because it’s not a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds super powerful. And I’m intrigued, the ‘buzz off.’ Sometimes I tell my emotions to do that and they don’t respond. How does this work, Morra?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I know, emotions are tricky. As told by a wonderful psychologist, Christine Runyan, in my book, anxiety is connected to our lizard brain. It is an ancient, ancient emotion because it helped keep us alive. Anxiety is basically a threat appraisal, a sense of something dangerous, and back in the cave days, that really could keep us alive because if we had a sense that something was rustling in the bushes, and we needed to run, that was good.

Nowadays, our bodies still get that sense that something dangerous is rustling in the bushes but that could be our 4:00 p.m. with Bill that we’re really dreading. We don’t have the ability at the base level to judge what’s a real threat and what’s not. And so, that’s why anxiety is really tricky because sometimes we feel it and we don’t even know why.

But it is through the process of noticing, naming your anxiety, and really tuning into it that you get to understand, “Wow, I’m really anxious right now. Why? Why did that name in that email inbox make me feel nauseous?” Did you ever have that happen? Like, you see someone’s name and you’re just like, “Oh, my God, no.” You feel nauseous and anxious, and you have to shut your laptop.

“Why do I get a migraine and feel very, very, very anxious before my Thursday p.m. staff meetings? What’s that trying to tell me? Why is this negotiation so hard? Why am I feeling like an impostor, like I don’t deserve it? Why do I instantly assume that this one piece of bad news means I’m going to get fired?”

Really interrogating why anxiety shows up for you, and it shows up for us all in different ways, and we all have different triggers of anxiety, begins the process of sort of unlocking it and gaining the ability to eventually be able to tell it, “You know what, it’s just a feeling. You can go away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Morra, I’d love to get your take on that, that curiosity, that interrogation, that why. I think sometimes I might be too curious for my own good in this department, and as I dig into some of my emotions, I just amplify it more. I’m thinking about, often if I’m, like, really irritated by something, it’s like, “Oh, why am I so angry about that? Well, because it’s bull crap for all of these reasons.” And then I kind of get more worked up.

And then I think it’s also perhaps a tendency to try to solve rather than feel the feelings, as former consultant, guilty as charged, trying to do that.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Where’s your PowerPoint?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, get some spreadsheets and segment that bad boy. So, yeah, I’d love your take on that. For those of us who are wired in this fashion, how do we navigate this curiosity most effectively?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh, my God. I found myself, just today, I really had sort of minor anxiety panic attack at about 11:00 and I couldn’t even figure out why. I just, all of a sudden, started shaking, and it was hard to breathe, and I couldn’t focus, and my hands were jittery. It was a lot of big emotion, and I was like, “What’s happening? You were just working on a spreadsheet.”

And I realized that I had gotten triggered by a bunch of the names on the spreadsheet who made me feel like I was an impostor and they were going to shame me if I reached out to them, that I was going to found out. That’s the thing, is that emotions happen mostly for a reason, and our challenge is that we want to instantly tamp down the uncomfortable ones, so you would instantly try to solve something because it’s uncomfortable for you.

And the work is not instantly doing whatever coping mechanism you want to do, whether it’s solving something, whether it’s getting at that Excel spreadsheet. My husband does that. He models everything out when he’s really uncomfortable. And to sit with it. If you’ve ever done therapy or meditation, what do they say? They say you have to ride the wave. The goal is not for the waves of life and its difficulty to stop coming. They’re going to keep coming. You’ve got learn how to surf the waves.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you mentioned the work, and understanding, and noticing, and naming, and tuning in. That’s cool. You also highlight a number of anxiety profiles in your book. Can you share some of those so that we can maybe get a jumpstart on some of this noticing?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, it’s really, really important to start noticing your thoughts when you get anxious. And we all have a tendency to get stuck in what are called thought traps. These are sometimes called cognitive distortions or automatic negative thoughts, and different people have their different sort of go-to thought traps. You may be someone who, when you feel anxious, you are a catastrophizer, you instantly assume the worst.

And what do you do when you assume the worst? You dive into action and drive your team crazy because you’re micromanaging them because you’re anxious about the worst thing happening. Or, do you avoid? You convince the worst is going come so you stick your head in the sand. Are you someone who gets perfectionistic when you’re anxious? Perfectionism and anxiety go together like peanut butter and jelly. We think perfectionism often is something that should be admired. It’s what the best people do.

And one of the things that I have learned in my study and research along the way is perfectionism is really often about anxiety. It’s that sense of, “If I’m not perfect, if I’m not the best, I’m not worth it. I’m a failure, and so I better become the best,” however that means to you, whether it’s overworking, or never stopping, or, again, micromanaging your team and driving them crazy. You may be someone who has impostor feelings, and it’s really common. I should say all of these are very, very common signs of anxiety and they become habits over time.

So, you may be someone who, when you’re anxious, you’re showing up at a new job for the first day, you feel like a fraud, you feel like you don’t belong. You may be someone who has a lot of social anxiety and, therefore, when you come into an arena where you feel uncomfortable or different, your mind goes to a place of, again, “I don’t belong. I’m not worth it. These people think I’m dumb,” whatever your greatest hits of negative thoughts and thought traps are.

And so, anxiety shows up for us in many, many different ways. It’s informed by our childhoods. It’s informed by the family systems we grew up in. One of the things that I talk about in the book is I think a really powerful thing for many of us anxious achievers, it’s the idea that you may be an over-functioner, that you may have grown up in a family where you were expected to do a lot, or you may have grown up too quickly, or had too much asked of you at a young age, and you’re used to just outperforming.

You’re used to just trying your best and making sure bad things don’t happen, and that can show up in your life and your career as someone who always takes control, who work super hard to make sure those bad things don’t happen. And that has a huge effect, again, on your colleagues, on your leadership. And so, we really, in the book, go in and look at things that inform what’s made you anxious, and also how it’s showing up for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then can you share, when it comes to if you have some unhealthy coping mechanisms that pop up, I’m particularly interested on how one tackles negative self-talk?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I would say that negative self-talk underlies all of this stuff. And so, again, your negative self-talk probably is personal to you. Like, we all have our negative self-talk. Mine is, “I’m lazy. I’m lazy and I don’t deserve this.” And part of what you have to do is you have to practice new self-talk.

And before you can do that, you need to make sure of a couple things. The first is sometimes we’re so anxious, we can’t even hear ourselves think, like any strategy that we would have that would involve using our cognition, like telling ourselves something, “It’s just not going to work,” because we’re super anxious, we’re worked up.

And that’s when breathing is really important. And I know we’ve all heard this a million times, that if you send your breath into your belly, and you exhale, it will make you less anxious and calm you down, but it’s really true. So, if you’re at a level of, like, “I’m so anxious, I really don’t even know if I can have a conversation with myself right now,” some breathing will help, physical things can help.

And then one of the things that I found really powerful for dealing with a negative self-talk is asking the self-talk, “Are you true?” And, again, anxiety can make us a little bit unreliable, so it’s good when you want to interrogate that self-talk to have facts or more neutral statements at the ready. That’s why it’s really great to have someone you can call, and say, “This 9:00 a.m. meeting means I’m going to get fired tomorrow because I never belonged in this job, and my boss has had it out for me, and I just haven’t worked hard enough, and I know that’s what this 9:00 a.m. meeting means.”

It’s really great to have someone you can call, and they’ll say, “Well, is that really true?” “I flobbed the slide in the huge presentation, and so that means my boss is never going to promote me.” “Is that really true? You’ve worked here for three years, and you’ve never made a mistake like that before. Do you really think that one wrong number in a slide means you’re going to get fired?” Our minds go to big places.

And so, trying to get a little distance, trying to get a little evidence against what you’re thinking, trying to have what psychologists would call a more balanced thought, these are all skills that you can use to slowly, slowly start to numb that really loud self-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Morra, you’ve got so many good things, and so many directions I want to go all at once, at least my favorite podcast or problem to have. When you mentioned having facts at the ready, that really resonated because, boy, I think I got it from a Tony Robbins book when I was a teenager. There’s a diagram with like a table with different legs for facts to support a belief. And I found it super useful.

I remember, in college, I had a bit of a rough patch because, in high school, I was winning, winning, winning so many things, Homecoming King, valedictorian, yadda, yadda, yadda. And then, in college, I just got a string of rejections, I was like, “What is going on?” And I remember, navigation has never been my strong suit, and I remember this so clearly, I was looking at a map, I’m getting old, I’m looking at map on paper while someone was driving, and I guess I gave some wrong answer as to when and where we should turn.

And then someone just snatched the map out of my hand, and I felt, “Ugh,” like I failed. And I guess that’s probably my thing, is that maybe it’s like perfectionist-ish in terms of like I’ve heard it called the idol of performance, like, “I want to do a great job. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to be excellent. And if I’m not doing an excellent job, it feels like my value is somehow diminished or I’m a loser.” And I know this is malarky, I know it’s foolishness, but sometimes it feels like it’s true, and that’s not pleasant. So, I guess that’s my mental health thing.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m sorry, I was going to say the famous trope is feelings are not facts but feelings often feel like facts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well said. Yeah, that’s true. Maybe it sounds much of a trope for me. It might be the first time I’ve heard it but I like that. And so, having your facts at the ready, I remember I wrote down just a list of accomplishments, like, “Okay, I know I feel like I’m screwing up right now, like I’m not doing so well, but, foundationally, it is a belief, based on real evidence, that I have achieved many things, and I am capable and competent.”

And so, I wrote it in this notebook, which I still have, and I don’t remember when I felt good enough to stop, but I think I have, like, 130 plus examples of achievements and things showing, like, “Okay,” and I referenced it numerous times, like, “Oh, man, I feel like a loser. I keep screwing up everything.” It’s like, “Everything, Pete? Let’s take a look. Let’s take a look. Hmm, I see 130 plus things that went quite well. So, all right.”

It really did help reframe things in terms of, “All right, this is a bummer, that these couple things haven’t worked out but the overall trend is pretty solid here.”

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh, my gosh, that is like an A+ in cognitive reframing. That is amazing. I encourage people to do it. I call it a brag file or a clips file. You know how journalists will keep clips that they’ve written. It is so powerful. And, again, when you know where your sort of soft underbelly is and what’s going to set you off, you can have something at the ready that’s really going to help.

So, one of my real anxiety triggers is money, and when I ran a business for 11 years, I would get bad money news sometimes. It was either bad macroeconomic news, like banks failing, or it was, “We’re not going to make our numbers,” whatever. And I would instantly go from zero to a hundred in terms of catastrophe.

And I learned that I had to have my business partner, who’s great with numbers and not emotional around them, back me up and give me the more balanced and likely scenario. I needed to see those numbers on the page so I could stop thinking we were going bankrupt tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. I also love what you had to say about thought patterns and cognitive distortions. I’m thinking of Dr. David Burns, Feeling Good, Feeling Great.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Greatest.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic books. I recommend them. I’ve tried to get the good doctor on the show. I have to prompt this.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Me, too. I have, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Have you got him?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I have not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he’s a little elusive but anyone knows the guy, anyone who knows him, we’re after him. So, I think that’s one, I’ll just say look him up. He’s so good. But some of those cognitive distortions could be categorized, like catastrophizing or all-or-nothing thinking, and it’s amazing how they pop up so much. And I think, for me, one is called emotional reasoning in terms of, “Oh, because I’m angry or irritated, some bull crap must be afoot somewhere and I’m going to find it.” And now I’m looking for it so that I’m slanted and looking in that direction.

So, that is some eye-opening stuff. I’d love to hear, you said, “Is this true?” any other pro tips when your mind is acting a fool, how you kind of get closer to clarity and truth?

Morra Aarons-Mele
So, another tactic that I absolutely love, Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett at Kent State calls this the so-what chorus. And this is another sort of exercise you might get if you took cognitive behavioral therapy, “So, okay, I’m really, really, really upset because I got that negative comment in my 360, and, oh, my God, I’m just so mad at myself. Like, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have gotten that comment,” and that’s both emotional reasoning, it’s mental filtering. The rest of the 360 could’ve been great, and you’re fixated on that one negative comment, and you’re ruminating, you’re dwelling on it even though there’s nothing productive you can do about it now.

Something you can do, again, get distance, take the teeth out of the anxiety, is to say, “Okay, so the worst happens from this. I get that negative comment from the 360. It’s all my fault and my boss knocks me out of the running for promotion. So what? I’m not going to get promoted. So what? It’s going to be horrible. I’m going to be ashamed, everyone is going to look at me, like, ‘Why didn’t he get promoted?’ I’m going to earn less money. It’s just going to be awful. So what? I’m going to feel bad.”

And you play it out. And a lot of times, certainly in what we’re talking about now, the world is not ending. The so-what is manageable. And, again, it’s that process of building a muscle that lets you sit with discomfort, yeah, maybe you did screw up, maybe that comment on your 360 really hurts, but it’s there. And the more distance we can get from all the uncomfortable feelings around that the better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, we look at the so-what, or the whys, or the implications repeatedly, and I suppose the bottom of all of them will probably be an emotion. Is that fair to say, like, “Oh, and then I’ll feel a certain way. Okay, that’s where the end of this chain goes. All right”?

Morra Aarons-Mele
It could be. Or, even if you play out, “So what? I’m going to get not promoted, and then I’m going to get layered, and then they’re going to want me to leave, and I’m not going to have a job.” You sort of play it out until you realize, “Okay, these are very unlikely but even if, God forbid, I lose my job, I could probably get another one.”

And so, it’s not saying that the bad feeling isn’t correct at some level. Life is hard and we’re messy and we make mistakes all the time. We’re human. I’m not telling you to pretend like everything is fine. But I want you to give it the proper weight and consideration because, often, when we’re anxious, things get very, very intense when they don’t need to be, to your point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Morra, I’d love it, before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things, if you have any other super favorite practices or tactics that make a world of difference in this stuff.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think that one of the things that I have learned and has been powerful for me is really, really important if you’re working from home, and if you’re on a lot of Zoom. And if you’re not working from home, and you’re out and about, or going into an office every day, you probably have your corolla but research shows that anxiety shows up in our body. Anxiety is a 360 reaction.

And, often, one of the ways to start tuning into your anxiety is to pay attention to your body and notice how it feels throughout the day, and notice how it feels before you’re standing Thursday meeting with your boss. When does your heart start beating? When do your hands start shaking? Are you clenching your muscles? So many of us clench, we clench down, we make our bellies really, really hard, and we clench our wrists, and we clench our jaws because we’re anxious and we’re stressed.

Your body is an amazing way to start tapping into this stuff, and you’ll probably feel better, too, because a lot of us take out our feelings on our bodies, and that makes it even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any thoughts associated with indicators that might be great to seek therapy?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I believe everyone should be in therapy.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, yes, no indicators to see. Just do it.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I know that there are too many access issues to count, and cost issues. I know that. We are in a crisis of shortage, but if you can, therapy unlocks so much. Self-awareness is, I just saw a survey, it’s the most-prized quality in leaders because self-aware leaders are better people to work with. And therapy is just like the quickest way to unlock a lot of self-awareness I know.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
My quote is a little bit basic but it’s “The perfect is enemy of the good.” It’s something that I tell myself every single day and that I sort of hold up as an ideal as I try to manage my own perfectionism, and just take a lot of the investment and emotion out of every single thing I do because it’s just not worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, I was going to say Feeling Good, the Feeling Good handbook by Dr. David Burns. Another book I really love is the The Anxiety Toolkit by Dr. Alice Boyes. I love really, really practical approaches to managing anxiety. Again, not anxiety that is crippling and totally disabling, but anxiety that you’re noticing and that you want to try to get a handle on.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Something that I use to be awesome at my job is breathing. I have found, over the past year, when I was in a very dark place, that keeping an eye on my breathing throughout the day is one of the biggest indicators towards keeping me energized, keeping my body pain-free after sitting on all those Zooms, and really helping with my mood and my anxiety level. I really clench my belly and don’t breathe deep. I just keep it all in my chest and that sets up a world of problems for me. And so, to be awesome at my job, I have to pay attention to my breathing.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is there a favorite breath-work practice or ratio or style that you love?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m a 4-7-8 girl.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that for going to sleep?

Morra Aarons-Mele
No, some people use it for going to sleep, but, for me, it helps me relax because it’s a little bit longer. So, you can do four breaths in, hold it for seven, and then try to exhale slowly, ideally, through your nose, for eight beats.

Pete Mockaitis
Four seconds in, seven seconds hold, eight seconds out. 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?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think that the title of my podcast and my book is something that people smile at and feel really seen by Anxious Achiever. Again, it sort of takes the teeth out of something that is hard for a lot of people to talk about. And I find that it gives people a smile and opens up doors.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, I would love them to buy my book wherever they like to buy books. I’d love you to check out my podcast. There are over a hundred episodes full of amazing leaders, experts, psychologists, cutting-edge thinking, stories, all about work and mental health. And if you want to send me a message on LinkedIn, I’ll always write back.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
My final action is to really, really practice tuning in. So much of what we do at work is from habit, it’s reflexive behaviors that we’ve been doing for years, and they’re not behaviors that are suiting us or the people that we work with. The way to become more awesome at your job is to become aware, and it starts with tuning in to what you’re feeling and when, and how your body is feeling, and how you’re reacting.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Morra, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Thanks so much, Pete.

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

Dan Lyons
Well, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about the wisdom of your book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. But, first, I have to tell you this is fun for me because I have seen every episode of “Silicon Valley,” and I’d love to hear if you have any particularly fond memories or moments from your work on the show.

Dan Lyons
Well, the funny thing is I was on the writing staff, and we would come in for, I’ll say, 12 weeks or something before shooting began, and then I’d be gone, so I wasn’t ever really there. I think, once, I’ve stayed for a couple of weeks of shooting, so I never really saw the show get made. And one thing that struck me, because I’m not a career TV guy, was that one script that I worked on and delivered, when the episode came out, it had bits and pieces that resembled what was on the page.

Because I think what happens is you write it, then they do a table read that goes well or poorly or somewhat in between, and then they do another rewrite, and then they start shooting but then they tell on every take, tell these guys to improv, and so a lot of the improvised takes are better than what we wrote. And then it goes, it gets edited, and then at that point, they’re looking at the whole season. So, they’re moving things around that used to be in episode two are now in episode five.

So, I learned a lot about how TV gets made, and there were funny moments but, I tell you, it’s kind of a grind. You just sit there, and it’s, like, ten people in a room. Or, imagine, for 12 weeks, five days a week, in the longest business meeting you’ve ever been in, and, yeah, some of the people are really funny but also you spend a lot of time sort of agonizing trying to make plots work. Yeah, it sounds like ridiculous. It’s a lot of work. It’s that hard. But mostly you’re just sitting there dealing with boredom, so, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I wondered how that works in practice, and maybe different writer rooms have different kind of work vibes and styles and approaches. But I imagine it would be a little bit of a divide and conquer, like, “Okay, Dan, you go and write and bring it back.” But is it pretty much, “Nope, all of us are in the room together, slogging through each line of dialogue”?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, the latter. And I don’t know how all shows are, but there’s always a showrunner. And the showrunner really is the head writer and it’s his show. It’s, like, in our case, it was Alec Berg, who’s really a real veteran. And we would all sit around and fill whiteboards with ideas together, and then once we had an episode, it seemed like, “Okay, that’s all there,” Alec would go off and write a version of it in prose, not in screenplay format.

And then he would dish that out to person A, person B, or me, and say, “Okay, now go take this and put it into final draft, put it into screenplay format, and give it back.” And so, it wasn’t really writing. It was more talking and pitching ideas in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for the inside scoop there.

Dan Lyons
I’ll tell you another thing I learned, which is, and I was always guilty of this myself. You’d watch a show and be like, “I think they’re wrestling with this and that and the commentary.” Every week on “Silicon Valley,” I think it was TechCrunch, or maybe it was another tech publication, would do a big essay. Oh, one was the one that Sarah Lacy had.

Anyway, they do this long, long piece about analyzing the story and who they thought this character was based and what the themes were. And I can tell you, nobody talked about themes or big ideas in the room. It was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, “How can we get more jokes? And what plot would be at least plausible?” And, yeah, nobody ever talked about big ideas, or grand themes, or doing satire.

There was some but, yeah, so they would ascribe meaning to these episodes, and I would read it and kind of crack up, going like, “I was there when we envisioned that. Believe me, that was…” so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s funny and reassuring because I remember, as a youngster, when I was first learning about the very concept of a theme in literature, and I was skeptical from the get-go, it’s like, “Do you really think the author had that in mind the whole time when they were doing that?” And I think, in hindsight, my take on this now is like, “Okay, books like ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ like, okay, is straight up is allegorical. It’s just trying to say something.” But other things, it’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe he just wanted to write a cool story, and you just made that up.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, you know, I taught creative writing and sort of literature after grad school at the University of Michigan. It always comes up, like, “Do you think the poet or the short-story writer of the novels meant that?” And I think sometimes, yeah, clearly, you know what they were trying to do, what the point is they’re trying to make with the story. But you get down to these details of, like, wordplay and stuff, and I actually came to believe, like, “I don’t care if the author meant that. It’s kind of interesting, so let’s just untangle that. Let’s talk about that because it’s kind of interesting.”

But, yeah, I wonder, too, intention, what was there, what wasn’t. Or, who said this? Oh, my son was telling me about this. Oh, no, maybe it was a painter, but he was asked to explain, “What’s this mean?” And he was like, “Well, if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t need to paint it. It’s a painting, just look at that.” So, yeah, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And sometimes words are something that we just hold onto and keep our mouth shut. Tell us, this book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you made while putting this together?

Dan Lyons
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you a couple. Well, this podcast is about how to be awesome at your job, so I’d talk more about listening. There are a couple of things up front that have to do with health and wellbeing, and the connections between how you speak and even, like, your immune system. There was this fantastic researcher at the University of Arizona, who, for the past 20 years, has been trying to study these connections between speech and other aspects of our lives and our physical and emotional wellbeing, and he’s making these incredible breakthroughs.

And he’s not ever really been written about. There are articles about when each of these studies comes out, but I spent a lot of time with him. He’s just a fascinating, fascinating guy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s his name?

Dan Lyons
Matthias Mehl, M-E-H-L.

Well, so I don’t know how I stumbled across him. I set out trying to figure out how to keep myself from talking too much, how to talk less because I had a problem with compulsive talking. And I started doing research, like, on two things, “Why do some people talk too much? And how can you fix it?” And I found these researchers who had created something called the talkaholic scale. It was a test you can take. The test, it’s in my book.

And I pegged the needle on talkaholic, just way, way up the charts. And then started trying to figure out, “Well, how do you fix that?” And so, I go off on this journey. And in that journey, I met Matthias Mehl. Because in the ‘90s, there was this book called The Female Brain that came out and talked about who talks more, men or women. And for centuries, the stereotype was always that women are the talkers and men don’t talk.

And The Female Brain came out and said, “Yeah, women speak 20,000 words a day, and men speak 6,000,” ballpark, and like 3x. And Matthias and some of the other people who were at…he was a grad student then at UT Austin, looked at that, and said, “That cannot be true. Those numbers cannot be true.” So, they built this little thing called the electronically activated recorder, or EAR, and, basically, the original was the primitive kind of like digital recording device, and maybe even tapes, with a thing attached to it that would turn it on at random intervals.

So, you had people carry this for a day or a few days, and it turns on and off, and on and off, and from that, you can extrapolate how many words a day they’re speaking. And what they found is, like, no difference. Men and women absolutely the same, both about 16,000 words a day. And, at the extremes, the highest talkers on the survey were all men, so it kind of blew this all up.

So, then he said, “Well, God, if we can study how many words you speak, why couldn’t we study what words you’re using or what kind of conversations you’re having?” So, they did the same thing but they tried to extract the character of your conversations. Then they tried to correlate that with happiness. So, they would have you carry the EAR device and they would calculate how many substantive conversations you had, how many really good conversations you had in a day, and how much of your talk would shift small talk and chitchat.

So, how much of your day is chitchat? And then they found that the people who had more good conversations and fewer bad conversations, or less small talk, turned out to be happier when they did self-scored reports of “How happy are you?” Then he said, “Wow, if people who have good conversations are happier, I wonder if they’re healthier?”

So, he did another passthrough, recorded all these people, then matched them to blood draws that measured their immune system, and found the same thing. Good conversations correlate with healthier immune systems or a lower risk of heart disease and inflammatory disease. And it’s gone a little beyond that, too.

But, yeah, it’s fascinating to think, and it sort of reinforced what I was thinking, that when I stopped just going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and became intentional about my speech, and spoke less, yeah, I did get happier, I did feel better, and I thought it was just that I was not annoying people as much. But Matthias sort of said, “No, it really is a physical reaction.”

And his example, if you want to know what a good conversation is, is that it’s authentic and you’re being honest and transparent. And the best way he puts it to me is it’s the difference between saying, “Hey, how are you?” or saying, “Hey, how are you?” or, “Really, how are you?” Anyway, that was a huge thing. And I think it does apply to work because I think it’s one thing maybe we don’t always do at work is to really have deep substantive conversations.

And I don’t mean like talking about your personal life, but at work, really digging into really important things that I think probably makes a healthier workplace. I think a lot of the lessons that I learned that apply to individuals also can be applied to an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, that’s a lot of powerful stuff. And it’s sort of funny, as we’re speaking now, you say you’ve recovered from being a talkaholic.

Dan Lyons
Well, there it is, I just gave you an overly long answer to a simple question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, as I contrast the conversation that we’re having now with videos we’ve seen of you being interviewed elsewhere, and from years past, it is like you have a different demeanor. So, it checked you out.

Dan Lyons
Do you think so?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dan Lyons
Well, I don’t know because I…hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you’re talking about “Silicon Valley,” the startups being a Ponzi scheme, I was like, “Wow, that guy is really going.” And it’s like, versus now, it does. It’s a different vibe in terms of just thoughtfully considering the pieces and the pacing. Yeah, I see the difference, Dan, for what that’s worth.

Dan Lyons
That’s good to know. My wife was very relieved that I did a lot of work on this. Can you imagine?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so far, fascinating, the quality of our conversations can determine the quality of our happiness and health. That’s cool right there. So, can you tell us, your subtitle is The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, in addition to being happier and healthier, what else can folks, looking to be awesome at their jobs, get from keeping their mouth shut?

Dan Lyons
Well, I’ll tell you another story. I do a lot about listening, again, so if you’re not talking, obviously, you have the opportunity to listen. And it’s something very few people can do well, and I include myself on that. I don’t think I’m a great listener, although I’m working on it. So, I’ll tell you a story. When I wanted to learn how to listen, there’s an executive coach named Jerry Colonna, who, he’s called sometimes The Yoda of Silicon Valley, or The CEO Whisperer.

So, he works with CEOs, with startup founders, or sometimes big CEOs, and he does these, like, three-day intensely emotional bootcamps, and everybody ends up sobbing, talking about their shame and guilt. He really digs deep into this, but the biggest thing they teach in these workshops is how to listen. And I think it’s become pretty much conventional wisdom now that a leader needs to listen more than talk.

So, I called him up, I got an appointment with him, “Can you just teach me a couple of the techniques you use in a bootcamp? I can’t come to a bootcamp but what I wanted to exercise is what I would do while I was there, and give me a couple of quotes. As a journalist, just, like, give me a couple of good quotes.” And so, we get on the call, and it’s like this, on video, and say hi or whatever. And then I get my laptop, I had my keyboard here, and I’m ready to ask him questions, and he says, “Dan, all right, stop talking. Stop taking notes.” I mean, not talking. “Stop typing. Stop taking notes. Stop and just look at me.”

I’m like, “Oh, crap.” He’s like, “So, what are you thinking right now?” And I’m like, “Enough of a jerk. Well, I’m thinking I’m not going to get anything useful for my chapter.” And he’s like, “Okay, fine.” He’s not rattled by that. And he starts interviewing me, and the questions get more and more intense. And his final one is like, “What do you fear? What do you most fear? What are you afraid of?” And I end up telling him this thing that I probably told two people in my life, like my wife, and I don’t know if I’ve even told anyone else. Like, really deep.

And then I’m welled up, like I’m kind of crying on this call. And then we’re out of time. It’s 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s how you listen, Dan.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. Listen, dude, so I hang up. And he’s like, “We can book another half hour to do the interview.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” but I hang up and I was like, “No way am I ever getting near that guy ever again. Like, he’s a witch. I’m not getting near whatever he does.” But, also, I was kind of angry, because I was like, “Now, I got nothing. I wasted all this time.”

And then I realized what you just said, like, he didn’t tell me he’s listening. He just showed me how to do it, and then he showed me how devastating it can be, like how powerful it can be if you do it well. So, I keep encountering this in work. We have meetings, and someone says, like, “Let’s have a half hour,” and there’s five of us, and someone just throws up, “Let me share my screen,” and throws up a PowerPoint deck with eight zillion datapoints on it, and just talks for 30 minutes, and the rest of you just sits there, going, “Oh. Mm-hmm.”

Or, companies do all hands, and it’s just an hour and 90 minutes of slam, slam, slam, slides and then five minutes for questions. And I come to think that if you’re a boss or you’re just a manager with a few direct reports, or you’re the CEO of a company, like listening is probably the most powerful thing you can do. Just imagine, if you’re a CEO, all you do is talk, you never listen, you have no idea what’s going on in the business. You live in a bubble. So, yeah, I really, really became, like, born again about the power of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s powerful stuff. And I’m thinking about times that I’ve really been listened to, and I’m thinking about this dude. His name is Corey McQuade, he was with the Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, and we’re just talking about insurance-y finance-life things. And so we did that in one meeting, and he was really listening, and he’s taking some notes, and then we had a follow-up meeting. He said, “You know, Pete, I heard you say duh, duh, duh, duh.”

And it was weird because it’s like, “I know I told you those things, and yet the fact that you internalized them, held them for this period of time, and are able to summarize, synthesize, represent, share implications, is like casting a spell on me.” It was wild.

Dan Lyons
Right. Yeah, it’s incredibly powerful. And it applies across all sorts of things. There’s research that I cite about working in sales, and how important listening is, talking less, asking questions, and then really listening. So, you’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to figure out what the problem is that you can solve.

And there’s, like, a study where a company called Dong uses machine learning. They suck up, like, thousands of hours of sales calls, analyzed them down, and tell you your top performers, asked this many questions, speak this many words, or this percent of the conversation is them talking versus the other. Yeah, it’s phenomenal, like it crossed pretty much every aspect of your life. Like, for me, it’s more with my kids and my wife, but where I’ve seen amazing, amazing changes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so just keeping your mouth shut enables listening, although it doesn’t guarantee listening. Dan, can you share some pro tips on, once we’ve shut our mouths, what do we do in order to do great listening from there?

Dan Lyons
Right. So, there’s a concept that people call active listening, which means you’re not just hearing. You’re actually leaning in, you really have to listen, and it’s really, really hard to do. One expert says if you’re listening, really listening, for 30 minutes and you’re not exhausted at the end of it, then you weren’t listening hard enough.

So, yeah, it’s a skill, I think, you can develop, and there are exercises. Like, one is you and I would sit down and I think we pick three questions, and I ask you those three, and you answer them, and I think you speak for five minutes without being interrupted, and then we flip it. Maybe it’s just one question. Anyway, so we take turns.

And if you don’t use the whole five minutes, we still sit there in silence, like I don’t speak for five minutes, and we flip it around. And then you just talk about afterwards, like, “How did you feel when you were listening? How did you feel when you were talking?” So, you talk about the exercise.

There are other types, yeah, where it’s just pretty much a recall with the guy you mentioned, listen to someone talk for 10 minutes then write down everything he came up. Don’t take any notes while they’re talking, so you just listen, then you go write it down. And it’s amazing how little you remember, or you can get better at it. But I think it’s a skill you can develop.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you just work it, there is practice.

Dan Lyons
You’re probably really good at it. I mean, to be a good interviewer, I think I’ve come to believe, I used to think it was about having great questions. I now think it’s about being a great listener, and then responding.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think the advantage I have in this context is we’re blessed to have so many incoming pitches, and we proactively seek out other folks, so that, by the time we’re talking, I am so fascinated by what you have to say that it’s like I’m chomping at the bit to get all that wisdom.

Dan Lyons
You know, I’m the same way. I used to be a journalist for a long time, and it’s what I loved about the job. If you go meet fascinating people, they would talk to me because I came from a magazine, so they thought, “Okay.” And, yeah, just hear their stories, and I go back and write their stories. But, yeah, it was fascinating.

I still like that. Like this book was really me just calling all sorts of interesting people I interviewed. I found a psychologist who works with prisoners in California, and the big problem they had was when they get up for parole hearing, they start and they’re okay, but then they get a little provoked and they start talking too much, and they will basically blow their parole hearing.

And so, she works with these mostly guys, and to teach them how to breathe and relax, and how to not lose it during an interview, and how to just stay calm and under-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, when it comes to keeping your mouth shut, we got better health, better happiness, better relationships, and the opportunity to listen really impact folks in a cool way and strengthen those connections. Well, now can you share with us how do we know if we are talking too much?

Dan Lyons
That is a really good question. In my case, I just knew that I was annoying people. I would leave a party and say to my wife, “Did I talk too much?” and she’d be like, “Yeah,” because it’s mostly driven by anxiety. So, I’d get anxious in a party and I would start talking, and then I just keep talking. One way you know you’re talking too much is if someone tells you, someone just says to you, “Hey, you really monologue too much. You should let other people get a word in.” I think a lot of people who really talk too much, basically, knows. A lot of people have said to me, “Oh, yeah, I want to read your book because I know I talk too much, it’s like a problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, they already know. It’s not we have to look for some special clues in terms of the body postures or body language of the people we’re talking to. You just got to know.

Dan Lyons
Or, you see people trying to pull away, you know what I mean. You’re talking, you realize…

Pete Mockaitis
Their feet are pointed away.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, they literally start to turn their body, or they go, “Oh, I’ve got to meet…” There are clues, and that’s a problem. Some people are such compulsive talkers, like, they don’t pick up on those cues. And so, I actually have a part of the book, too, about how to escape an over-talker. And there’s another version of an over-talker who’s the interrupter. So, how do you break the habit of interrupting? And then, also, how do you deal with someone who’s interrupting you?

Again, it’s almost always men. Men interrupt women constantly. The stats are incredible, and there’s just lots of research, it’s not like it’s one study that found this. But, yeah, so then it’s a lot of times men aren’t aware that they’re interrupting constantly until you record a conversation, and then show it to them, and they’re usually mortified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.  With the Gong Group that was doing that machine learning and data analyses on the high-performing sales folks, was there something like a magical ratio or range associated with questions asked or proportion listening?

Dan Lyons
The most successful sales reps asked 11 to 14 questions. Fewer than that and you’re not digging deep enough but more than that, and the call starts to feel like an interrogation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is that like in half an hour or what time are we thinking here?

Dan Lyons
They analyzed more than 500,000 calls. On the sales calls with the best close rates, where, one, in which reps knew how to keep quiet and ask questions instead of making a sales pitch, 11 to 14, they deduced the calls worked best and the questions are scattered throughout. And when a rep identifies three to four specific problems, no more, no fewer, that the customer needs to solve, the best reps made calls feel like conversations.

They spent 54% of the call listening, 46% talking. The worst reps talked 72% of the time. And I don’t have how long a call was to land those 11 to 14 questions. But, yeah, those are some interesting datapoints. I don’t know how prevalent the idea is. I think it’s an outdated idea that sales guys or salespeople just talk, talk, talk, they’re fast talkers, and they kind of twist your arms, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that my impression is that most sales folks are aware that they should ask questions and listen. And yet the common practice is often not as much that, even though that is the best practice that is published and known and promulgated. That’s my sense, anyway.

Dan Lyons
I think so, too. And I think that’s only because it’s really hard. Even if you know you should do it, it’s really difficult to do that well. And it’s a skill you really have to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we’re after those benefits of talking less where we clearly understand, “Okay, yup, I am talking too much,” can you break down for us, Dan, some of the key practices or step-by-steps to successfully talking less?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I actually came up with five, that I guess you call them exercises, that I do. So, not every day, but I think of it like a workout that it’s, like, going to the gym and you don’t even have to do this all day every day. You might pick an hour or an opportunity to use one of these is how I view it. So, the first one I have is called ‘when possible, say nothing,’ which is very obvious, but it’s often very possible to say nothing when you’re checking out at the store. So, there are occasions where gabbers like me will start striking up a conversation with someone but you don’t really need to. So, that’s one I practice with.

Another one is mastering the power of the pause. So, it’s this idea that when you pause, it makes people uncomfortable, and can be uncomfortable for you to sit with a pause. There are some research that shows it only takes four seconds, a four-second break in a conversation for people to start feeling uncomfortable. So, if you can master that and live with that uncomfortable silence, you have a lot to gain.

Actually, even in public speaking, but in negotiations, for example, pauses are a really huge thing. And I interviewed a few master negotiators about just that, how to use a pause strategically in a negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s intriguing. So, four seconds of pause makes people uncomfortable. And so, are we saying, one, live with that yourself. But is it sometimes the right answer to, “Go ahead and have them feel uncomfortable in that pause”?

Dan Lyons
Well, no, no. Yeah, exactly right. So, like car salesmen, I think they’re trained to do this and to say, “Here’s the price,” and then sit. And according to one negotiator I interviewed, a woman in Boston, she’s brilliant, she’s like, “When they do this, people actually start negotiating against themselves. It’s often, too, with a job offer and a salary offer that you know it’s too low, and they’ll just sit there.”

So, if I hold ideas, you just do the same back, you go, “Well, hmm, I’ll think about that.” And she told me something evil, which is that, I don’t know if it’s all the time or at least once. She would practice on car salesmen because she felt like they were fair game, and they’re out there, and it’s like easy prey. They’re always available for practice. So, she would find, she’d get an offer for a bait-and-switch offer in the paper, or, no, flyer, “If you want to trade in your car, you can get this much and get this much of a deal on,” whatever new car it was, or some crazy offer you weren’t going to get.

And so, she walked in, and said, “Hey, I’m interested in this offer.” She told me, “I didn’t want to get a new car. I like my car. I have no desire to buy a new car.” She says, “Well, I saw this offer.” They said, “Well, you know, that’s…we can’t blah, blah, blah, we don’t have one of those. But what we can do blah.” And she was like, “No, I came in because there was an offer, so if you can give me this offer, I’ll buy the car.” And then she just waits.

And she said, “They’ll to, like, try stall you. They’ll go out back and talk to the manager. There is no manager.” Like, she worked in the car business, too. She’s like, “They’re not going there. They’re going to have a cup of coffee and just make you sit there.” So, she said, “I brought, like, a thermos and a book, and I would sit there and wait.” She’s like, “I picked a day when I’m just going to do this.”

And she said she knew it wasn’t going to end up in her buying a car, so it was really just sharpening her own skills, “Can I just go and sit with this quiet?” And, eventually, you go back and forth a few times, and they say, “Well, I guess you’re not going to get a car today. Bye.” But, yeah, so, using that discomfort. There’s a story, too, in the book of a guy who was making a big sale to, I don’t know, someone in charge of government in the Middle East to have a franchise to sell candy or chocolate in this country, and the salesman says, “Well, here’s the price,” and the guy says, “Hmm, that’s too high.”

So, the other guy just sat there. And the story goes, he sat there for 45 minutes, and then finally the customer said, “Okay, we have a deal.” Like, they just sat there. I like that. To me, it almost sounded like it can’t be true but, yeah. So, pauses are very powerful. I had other things where I tried to find, add silence to my life.

I found this stuff called forest bathing, which is you go out in the woods and you don’t really do much. You just sit in the forest, usually with a guide, which I found really good. I also think you should quit social media, if not completely, then almost, as much as you can. I think social media is creating mental illness at a societal level, which is also what pushes us all to talk too much. We live in this culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, there are some spooky data, especially with teen and pre-teen girls. Ugh.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. But also it just, if you think about it, the model they have is “We need to keep you on the site as long as possible so you look at many ads as possible. How do we do that? Well, if you’re just reading, you’re not going to stay that engaged, so we need to get you talking, and sharing, and retweeting, and getting in arguments with people.”

So, the best way to get you engaged is make you angry. “So, we put stuff into your feed, we figure out using machine learning algorithms,” they know collecting thousands of datapoints about you, like down to “How long did you pause over that photo?” Everything. So, they know exactly how to provoke you. But the problem is then that anger you experience online carries with you back into your real life.

So, you get on this dopamine cycle if it feels good, and then you stop and you crave the dopamine, but you’re also creating this cycle of just epinephrine just flowing through your bloodstream all the time which causes all sorts of health problems. Like, for example, you notice how angry people are now compared to 20 years ago? And what’s changed in 20 years? The internet. Social media. So, yeah, I think if you can stay away from it.

I, actually, think there’s a larger problem of information overload, where there’s just so much stuff. I have statistics on how many movies or how many hours of entertainment Netflix is going to make this year. The number is crazy. So, we just have a lot coming at us, and I don’t think our brains have evolved as fast as the internet has.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got some silence, we got quitting social media. Any other key practices?

Dan Lyons
Well, the last one was learn how to listen, which we already talked about. But I tell you, I also interviewed a woman who runs this thing called the International Listening Association. I couldn’t imagine there is a thing like that. They have an annual conference. And I said, “What is this, like people walking around, not talking?” And she said, “Oh, everybody makes that joke.”

And she and I had become friends since then, but she also is a professor. She teaches a course in listening, like the whole course is just how to listen. And it turns out to be very powerful in that you can be interviewing someone, I found. I interviewed someone who’s really, really shy, like almost couldn’t get on the phone to talk, like really, really has social anxiety, so I knew that conversation is going to be difficult.

If I go in rapid-fire questions, blah, blah, blah, like that just going to just shut it down. And so, I had to really take a deep breath, ask my questions and not fire off the next question, just listen, and it kind of worked. And I told this professor about it, I said, “You know, it’s amazing is this woman. The more it went out, she became really fascinating. When she was super shy and uptight at first and really uptight, and by the end, she was laughing, and telling me stories and about her life and growing up.” And I said, “She was the most amazing person.”

And my friend, the professor, said, “That, actually, that’s what happens when you listen to people. They actually do become more interesting.” So, I was like, “Wow, that’s really powerful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the name of the professor?

Dan Lyons
Her name is Sandra Bodin-Lerner, that’s B-O-D-I-N dash L-E-R-N-E-R. I should introduce you. You might find her to be a really interesting guest. She first got a career, she was like a public-speaking coach for people in business. And now she does that, but she also does listening workshops in companies because they realize, “Oh, yeah, it’s not just about speaking well.”

At one point, she made, I think, it was really fascinating, and we talk a lot about sort of in companies now, of we need to have these difficult conversations. We need to have these conversations and reckon with big issues, but nobody ever tells us how to have a conversation. So, yeah, she’s a fascinating woman.

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

Dan Lyons
No, I’m all good. I appreciate you taking an interest in my book.

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

Dan Lyons
Well, along the lines of this, Winston Churchill’s mother was named Jennie Jerome, and she once described…this is about listening, a story about listening. She once described the difference between having dinner with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, so two very big, important British politicians.

And she said, when she had dinner with Gladstone, “I left thinking that he was the cleverest man in England. When I had dinner with Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.” And, to me, that always just summed up why listening works, what the effect it has on the other person.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine she liked the latter more afterwards.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, I think it would be Matthias Mehl’s research about good conversations and the immune system. It’s a remarkable report.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dan Lyons
I’ll just tell you what I’m reading right now, which is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s, like, an unbelievable book. It’s huge. I guess, as a writer, I admire it because it won the Pulitzer Prize. Just the writing is amazing. Just the amount of research he did, and how he shaped into a narrative, into a story. It’s phenomenal.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, at work you mean? Yeah, I’d become a big believer in notebooks. I got this while I was researching my book, reading Richard Branson’s book. And Richard Branson is a big believer in listening, and one thing he does is he always carries a notebook and a pen, and takes notes. And he says it’s one way to become a better learner, he forced himself to learn and write things down. And then also you have a record of every meeting you have. So, yeah, in the last two years, I’ve become really, really a believer in notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be all the more awesome at your job?

Dan Lyons
I put sticky notes above my computer screen on the wall, and say things like “Quiet,” “Listen,” “Wrap it up.” I just put reminders not to talk too much. And that habit, it has helped me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think it is that the first beat of the book for me was talking less, listening more, speaking with intention, can do so much for you. It can make you happier, healthier, more successful, blah, blah, blah. The second thing I realized that I did not anticipate going in is that the real power of it is that you make the lives of people around you better. So, that’s the real ripple effect of this, and that was quite profound for me.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, my website DanLyons.io.

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

Dan Lyons
Yeah, yeah. Next time you’re in a meeting, which will be tomorrow, you probably have eight tomorrow, see if you can listen more than talk. Oh, here’s a great exercise. If you’re on a Zoom call with one other person, if the person will agree to let you record the call, record the call, take the recording, send it to Rev.com, or something like that, have it transcribed.

Then print it out and you see, literally, in front of you, just in blocks of texts, how much you talked, how much the other person talked, and then keep trying to work on that so you’re less and less. That, to me, was like an eye-opening exercise and, yeah, I think a really good one to try. If you want to learn to listen more, talk less, that would be a great exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun as you keep your mouth shut.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, thanks for letting me talk for so long about not talking, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

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

Sharon Melnick
Delighted to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing the story of the time you said, “No, thanks,” when the White House asked you to come on over and present your research.

Sharon Melnick
What a claim to fame. Well, it was early on in my career, and there was one of those multi-artists rock concerts, and I went down to Washington, DC where it was being held. And as I entered the stadium, there was a cluster of people over to my left, I looked, and there was one person who I recognized. It was Tipper Gore, she was the wife of the then Vice President Al Gore, and she was a champion for women’s empowerment and families.

Without overthinking it, I went right over, I shook her hand, “Hi, I’m Dr. Sharon Melnick. I do research at Harvard Medical School. I help people from difficult childhoods be confident and resilient and kind of have the adult contribution that they want to.” She’s intrigued, we start to talk, we’re having a little bit of an estrogen fest going on together.

At a certain point, she turns to her chief of staff, and she says, “Melissa, would you get Dr. Melnick’s contact information? We want to bring her down to the White House, share the policy implications of her research.” So, I go home, I write up a little something, I send it off. Several weeks later, I’m lacing up my sneakers to go for a run, the phone rings. It’s Melissa.

And she starts telling me about all the initiatives that Tipper is doing around the country, helping millions of families, and she pops the question, she says, “Will you come down to the White House to share the policy implications of your research?” So, Pete, I picture myself around that table at the White House, and then I respond, and I say, “No.”

Well, I don’t exactly say no, like, I said, “Well, you know, I’m still trying to figure out what the research says,” but, essentially, I declined an invite to the White House. Now, why? Why would I do that? Because, like I said, when I was picturing myself around that table at the White House, I was thinking, “Those people are going to judge me for not knowing enough.” I thought that they would think that I wasn’t smart enough, so I wasn’t going to give them the opportunity to do that.

What I did was I prioritized my own evaluation of myself over the contribution that I could’ve made for millions of people. In other words, I gave away my power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s powerful. And it’s interesting because I think I’ve totally done that on different stages, different scales, daily, weekly, or monthly, in terms of, “Ooh, this is a cooler opportunity.” It’s like, “Oh, but…” Or, maybe I have an idea, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s ready yet, if I’m worthy.” Or, even if I get a cool email.

I remember I think I was in high school, and there was a girl I met at Journalism Camp, I thought she was really cute and cool. And she sent me an email, it’s like, “Oh, okay, okay,” and then I wanted to really make sure to send her a very witty and clever and flirtatious and perfect email back, but then I didn’t have any good ideas. And so then, I just sort of let it slide, and then it would get weird, like, “Hey, thanks for your email a month ago.”

Sharon Melnick
We’ve all been there.

Pete Mockaitis
She called me, actually, it’s like, “Well, if you wanted to ‘stay in touch’ as you said in the card, then…” dah, dah, dah. So, yeah, that notion of you want to look good, to be awesome, be perceived well, gets in the way of doing some real good for folks.

Sharon Melnick
Well, what’s a real takeaway from your story, and I think mine, is that other people might really want to hear from us and really want to kind of get the best that we have to offer but what we are doing is that we are kind of being subjective, not objective. It’s all going through the filters of how we evaluate ourselves.

And another thing, I think, I hear in your story is all the angst that went into writing that email. We’ve all been there, right? And it’s so relevant, actually, because when we’re in situations that are stressful and, especially, situations where it feels like the other person is the one who can determine kind of our worth, you know what I mean, or how we should feel about ourselves, and however they respond to us is kind of like a referendum on our worth.

And it puts us into a mental swirl, and it has us kind of go over things, and over things, and then maybe even be paralyzed and not take action. And that’s a really good kind of example of what it’s like when we’re out of our power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you, so that ties together. I like your story a lot better than mine for its illustrative power and relatability. But, maybe, could you kick us off by sharing, you’ve done so much research here, is there a particularly surprising, fascinating, jaw-dropping discovery or insight you’ve made over the years about what it takes to be in your power?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. So, I’m going to share two with you. The first is not my research, actually, but it’s a colleague of mine in the Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coaches, Ron Carucci. And he studied executives who rise into power for 15 years. And so, he studied power and how you use it and what it looks like. And his finding was that the biggest abuse of power is not using it.

And I say this, actually, because I think that we think of this idea of power as being kind of a negative, or selfish, or force other people, and manipulative, and all of that. And that’s really only the case when someone is in power, in a position of power but not in their power. So, then they might act toward other people in a way that tries to get that feel good or feel one up within their selves.

So, the theme of kind of what your story and my story, and what we’re talking about here, is the opportunity is, when you’re in your power, is to be able to be good in you, to have a sense of sovereignty, like you decide who you are, you have ways of kind of filling yourself up, or feeling confident and secure and valuable and worthy within your own self, and you don’t have to look to people, or get permission, or hope, or control them, or any of the things, you know what I mean, that we try to do in order to get them to act towards us so that we can feel that within ourselves.

And that’s really the essence of kind of being in your power, because when you know how to kind of get back to good in your or stay good in you and not react in a situation, then the way that you act can actually make the situation better, it can get you the outcome that you want. And not only make it better for you but for everyone involved, for all the families that I could’ve touched with my research, for the romance you could’ve sparked if you had reached out.

And I think that that’s what most of us want these days. It’s like we want to use our emotional energy toward making a difference, not spinning, wondering what other people are going to think about us, and trying to get them to think a certain way.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, given all that, how would you summarize the big idea or core thesis of your book In Your Power: React Less, Regain Control, Raise Others?

Sharon Melnick
Yes. So, when you’re not in your power, and let me just give a little context here because any of us can get kicked out of our power kind of at any moment. It has nothing to do with kind of your level of accomplishment or anything like that. You could be a talented woman who feels overlooked or under-recognized in the workplace. You could be a leader of a team and you just can’t kind of get your people to live up to expectations. Maybe it’s in your personal life where you have someone who is really kind of selfish and kind of difficult to deal with.

And what happens in these situations is that you can get emotionally hijacked, you can get into that mental swirl, and the problem is that the way that you try to make the situation better often makes it worse and it kind of perpetuates the situation. So, that’s why it’s really important for each of us to have the skills to stay in our power because when you do that, then when you act, you can actually get unstuck, you can get the outcomes that you want, and you can make it better for everyone around you.

So, in my book In Your Power, I try to really break it down for people, “What are the things that you…what does it really look like?” It looks like a sense of agency, like you feel like you have control. It looks like a sense of sovereignty, like you decide who you are. And it looks like a sense of efficacy, so that when you act, when you say things, it lands, you move people, you make it better, and then you just kind of create a virtuous, a positive spiral from there.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was intrigued when you said that sometimes the way we try to make things better makes things worse. Could you give us an example or two of some common ways that materializes?

Sharon Melnick
Oh, so many of these. So, for example, I had a woman start coaching with me, and from the very first moment, she starts off by saying, “I can’t take it anymore.” So, she’s a very capable, competent person in her organization, and some of her peers are kind of not doing all they need to be, and everything is kind of rolling downhill onto her plate.

Her manager is reaching out and interrupting her from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., and she’s responsible for making sure that people around the world are getting paid, so she’s in a very important position. So, she, prior to us kind of helping her to get back in her power, she was going to her boss, saying, like, “Okay, fine. All hours of the night, just come to me and I’ll kind of fix it.”

She felt like she had to prove herself 24 hours a day in order for her to be appreciated. She was kind of blaming her peers in her head and telling them they needed to do it differently, and nothing was changing. In fact, it just kept spiraling into more and more hours. She hadn’t had dinner with her husband in a year. So, this is an example of she wasn’t really kind of understanding what was the underlying problem in this situation.

So, just as an example, how she approached the situation is she brought all the people together who were involved, and she really helped them to understand what the underlying issue is, kind of the anatomy of the problem, so to speak. And, of course, when she had tried to get them to put things back on their plate, they don’t have a lot incentive to do that, so she just would be resentful and angry at them that they weren’t voluntarily kind of taking things back from her plate, but she didn’t kind of really understand how to influence them effectively, how to really put things in terms of what’s in it for them so that they would be motivated to kind of do these things.

But when she did actually bring everyone along, she created the solution. She suggested a reorganization. And, actually, they all went along with it. She was offered a $75,000 retention bonus, and the CEO of the company called her in a meeting, and said, “We’re putting you on the fast track for chief technology officer, so you got to get busy grooming yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Sharon Melnick
And she was ready to leave, though, because she didn’t feel like she had any power in the situation but she had so much power to look beyond the finite problem, and to look more toward infinite solutions that were available if she could just see them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, in terms of how we get there, you’ve got 12 power portals: precision, perspective, physiology, purpose, psyche, proficiency/persuasion, partnership, protection, powerful truth, people, and position. You may have noticed, listeners, these all start with the letter P. I would love to get your take on a couple of these portals that is just the most leveraged or effective in terms of just a little bit of effort gets you a whole lot of results.

And for the results, I’m particularly interested in is reacting less, because sometimes it feels, I think that’s, in my experience, it really does feel like it’s outside my power, like I’m in less control of myself, not that I’m just screaming at people or flying off the handle, but it’s really interesting how, like, the body, just biochemically, naturally, you’ve got a stressor and then you’re different afterwards in terms of how you’re operating, some of that narrowing, or the fight-flight-freeze business.

And I recently had an insight, I banged my head on a light fixture that was hanging low because it was over a dining room table, and I was cleaning up. Anyway, I banged my head, and I noticed that even though I understood how that happened and it didn’t hurt a ton, my body was filled with all the stress stuff, and I was just mad at all kinds of things for the next 20 minutes.

And it’s, like, even though there was not an issue that I had to deal with or sort through, it was a very primal thing – head hurts, feel stressed, now irritable for the next 20 minutes. And I thought, “Geez, I’d love it if I could just take the shortcut and flip the off switch on this real quick.”

Sharon Melnick
Okay. So, let’s flip the off switch and then we’ll come back to kind of things that you can do maybe to prevent a reaction, but let’s take you in the moment where it’s too late, you’re already there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, whether you banged your head or someone sends you an email that you find offensive.

Sharon Melnick
Totally.           So, if you’re already kind of having a reaction, what’s really important is that that reaction is going to stay kind of swirling around you, like you experienced. You have to actively do something to move it through your system. You have to kind of complete the stress cycle, because what’s happened there is that the stress reaction has been activated, and then it’s doing its job to kind of swirl around in your body, and you have to move it through until its completion, and then you can get back to a state of calm.

So, there’s a few different ways that you can do this, especially if you’re really in kind of intensely emotional state, like you might’ve been, or if you’re offended by an email. Really, one of the best things that you could do is whatever it looks like for you to move it through your system, and I mean, like, you got to get it out.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say it, are you thinking, is there like a biochemical basis we’re talking about here, like cortisol? Or, what do you mean by it?

Sharon Melnick
Yes, that’s exactly right. So, there are stress hormones that have been activated because there’s something that was out of your control, or violates your values, or literally is a pain response. And so, it feels like we’re taken over, it feels like we can’t control, but actually there’s many things that you can do.

So, for example, each person listening needs to develop their own personal repertoire of things that you can do to move it through your system. So, one thing that’s really great, like if you’re working from home, is if in between Zoom calls, let’s say, is if you can do like a dance break and put on a rave song, and literally just get it out for two minutes.

And I have for listeners, if you go to InYourPowerBook.com, I actually maintain Spotify playlists for different emotional states, and you just pop in the song and it immediately puts you kind of in the state to dance it out, or whatever it looks like for you. Like, earlier today, there was a boxing gym, boxing bag in my gym, and I went down there and kind of just bruised that bag for just five minutes. Also, at InYourPowerBook.com, there’s videos there of where I have these energy techniques where you literally can kind of like push it through.

But whatever it is for you, go smack some golf balls, smash pillows, whatever is right. I had a client who had a really, really narcissistic boss, and just was having really needed to not have her boss’ insecurities kind of be moving through her, like taking place in her system. So, she went into her car and rolled up the windows, and like let it rip with a scream, and she goes like, “Oh, I feel way better after this.”

Like, literally, whatever it takes for you, especially if you’re angry. But you might be in a more kind of hurt or sad or grieving kind of place, that’s why you want a playlist that’s kind of right for the moment. But that’s really, really important because it brings you back to a sense of mental clarity. And, especially, when you get back in your body, that’s when you remember who you are, because when you’re having that reaction, it’s really going to skew and kind of see the situation through an emotional filter.

Another thing is kind of you want to have all of these feathers in your quiver, is to really allow that emotion to move through you in a way, like taking the analogy of a wave, and kind of surf the wave. And we know that the intensity of an emotion only lasts 90 seconds. So, if you can kind of allow it to move through you and not act on it or just know that it’s going to kind of dissipate over that 90 seconds even though it may take a few 90-second waves.

But to take yourself out of that moment, and to put yourself in the future of 90 seconds from now or in a few minutes from now when it will have passed, and do that and to do deep breathing, to reconnect to your emotional centers, which have taken you over, back with your thinking centers. That’s when you can have mental clarity.

And we can go to kind of our next topic of discussion, which is, “How do you not see that situation in a way where you take it personally and react?” So, very, very important to move it through your system until you have a sense of completion. Crying is a great example of this, and this can be fraught, especially for women. But actually, most women cry when they’re frustrated not when they’re weak. But after you have a good cry, you have that sense of, “Oh, I feel different, like I feel better. I feel in a different place.” That’s that sense of completion.

And always, always, after you’ve moved through kind of a negative emotion, you’ll always want to fill it back up with something that’s fun, pleasant, kind of gives you that sense of like you’re lit up in your body. And that’s why on the Spotify playlists, we also have songs that will do that for you within a minute after you’ve moved it through your system. So, these are really good ways, moving it through your system, filling it back up with good, and then deep breathing or anything that’s calm, that reconnects you with your thinking centers.

Pete Mockaitis
And this 90-second wave is the idea that there will be multiple waves that follow a 90-second arch of peaking and troughing?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, sometimes it just moves through you in one 90 seconds. If it’s really an intense emotion or if you think of the situation again and rehashing it in your mind, you might get another wave that gets re-triggered. And then there’s also a whole suite of techniques, mind-body “techniques” that have been developed that really help.

Ones that I’ve used and recommended are, like, tapping, like emotional freedom techniques, or havening, or even for people who have particularly intense trauma-related emotions like EMDR, so there are things. It’s the state of your nervous system that really determines kind of whether you’re back in your power or not. And so, I think this is something that we’ve all learned in these times, is to really prioritize taking care of our nervous system.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it, so I know a little bit about tapping and EMDR. I do not know it all what havening means. And I think with your strong credentials, I would love to get your hot take on, well, one, what are these things? Two, is the research base pretty good behind them, or is it sort of way out there and, like, question mark, we don’t know yet, but some people love it, and maybe it’s placebo, maybe it’s not? Like, what are these things? And what is the state of research on their efficacy?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. I think these are all techniques that have been shown to help people who are in, especially, intense states of emotion because something has become activated in you. We call it triggered. And these are all techniques, and there’s others, that kind of work at a kind of physiological level to help you reconnect with a sense of calm, and to reconnect your emotional centers with your thinking centers so you can have more perspective and mental clarity.

And it kind of de-intensifies the emotion and helps you sooth yourself and come back to a place of safety in your own body, which we don’t always feel when we’re…especially if you’re facing overwhelming kind of stress. It can feel very activating of behavioral patterns or emotions that’s maybe longstanding that you felt before.

A definition of a trigger really is a situation that you, in which you feel out of control, that you’ve been in, let’s say, too many times before in your life, and it kind of reactivates that sense of feeling out of control, which can make people feel unsafe. I think, also, finding someone who is safe for you, who you feel comforted by, who can hold your emotion with you and not dismiss you or make you feel bad or less than for being who you are, or having the experience as you are. That person can kind of lend you a little bit of the calm that they have in their nervous system and can help to calm you down. That’s why we call the parasympathetic nervous system kind of the safe and social part of our nervous system.

So, these are all things. And I think the takeaway that I think you all want to have is that, in those moments when you feel full of pain or just emotion, it can feel hard to think beyond that moment, it can feel hard to remember that you will feel good in you again, or that you can have things that you want, or opportunities that you want, or success or abundance in your life again, it can feel hard to feel understood, or that you can connect with people and feel loved again.

So, these are all techniques that take you out of the crunch of that emotional reaction, and remind you who you are, and enable you to connect so that you can then experience that sense of abundance and infinity, not only just the crunch of the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us the step one, two, three if I want to do some tapping or some havening or, say, EMDR? How do I go about doing that?

Sharon Melnick
Yes. So, those are all really different kinds of techniques, and they’re all really specific. And you could Google any one of them. They usually all start with kind of being in a specific experience that you’re having and feeling emotional about it, and then takes you through a process of kind of dipping your toe in, or feeling the feeling that you’re feeling, and then through a process of kind of shifting that emotion to one where you can think about it in a way that has more perspective, and then starts to calm down your system.

So, tapping, taps on kind of meridian points. EMDR tries to integrate across your thinking and your feeling, to put those together. And havening is more just a directly kind of a calming, a self-calming experience where you immediately can just soothe yourself. So, they’re all kind of different modalities but all have a similar intent.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember I met, at Podcast Movement, Gene Monterastelli who hosts the TappingQandA podcast, and he’s a great dude. And so, do I need to be working with a professional to do these kinds of things or can I just Google it and take a crack at it?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, I think it’s both, actually. I think it depends on kind of how much you’re really affected by the stress that you’re experiencing, how much it’s bringing up kind of old emotions and patterns. There’s lots of solutions that you could use. For example, there’s a free app called The Tapping Solution. So, this is something, like if you’re having a little bit more of a mild experience and you want to kind of check it out for yourself. Maybe you’re feeling a little anxious in a situation, you can definitely take yourself through. They have many different emotions.

But I would say, if something is getting re-triggered in you that’s part of a longstanding adaptation or pattern, and it’s kind of interfering in your life, you’re not able to have the happiness and relationships or the success in your work, then I would definitely seek out a professional who can help you, shepherd you through this process, create a sense of safety and continuity in your narrative, and work it out, really, at its foundational level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so anyway, those are responses to acute stuff, but you said that a big part of the mastery here is having a perspective or frame or context upfront so that we don’t get hijacked in the first place. How do we build this?

Sharon Melnick
So, there are many ways that you can kind of stay good in you and not react, not take something personally in a situation. I’m going to go through a few but I’m going to start with my go-to question. This is a write-it down. Definitely, get your pen or your computer ready.

So, when you’re in a situation where it just feels like things are not going your way, and you’re just, “Why is this happening to me?” the very first question that you want to ask yourself is, “Why might this be happening for me, not to me?” And that is an immediate gamechanger, it puts you in control of the situation, and points your attention toward, “What is the learning? What is the opportunity? What can I get out of this or kind of make out of this situation?”

So, just as an example, I had a woman in my group, a next-level leader coaching program, and she just got out of a conversation with her manager, and she had been passed over for promotion already, and then heard from her manager that her manager was promoting someone else who came in after her and isn’t half as skilled and hasn’t even gotten kudos from the CHRO, the chief human resources person, on all the good, like my client had.

And so, she was really upset, taking it personally, “Why is this happening to me?” in a funk. And when we asked the question, “How might this be happening for you, not to you?” she said it just immediately shifted her perspective, and she said she went from kind of victim in the situation to victor in the situation because she really then thought, “You know something, like this promotion that this other person was just put into, it’s kind of like a half-step up from a director to a senior director.”

But, Nikki, my client, well, she was really doing work that was like already at a VP level or even above. Like I said, she was presenting to the chief human resources officer and across the board to leadership. And that’s what she really wanted and was ready for, and so she came to see it as like, “Actually, we are not on the same timeline, me and my manager, or this company. And this is really showing me that it’s not even what I like. It’s like a promotion I didn’t get but that I didn’t even want.”

And she started to put herself on a track for even more elevated positions, which she got within several weeks from then. So, it’s just an example of she would’ve just really stayed, like feeling done to, resentful, blaming, feeling overlooked in that situation. But as soon as she asked that question, it was like it opened up a whole field of opportunities where she had control and she could do something about it. So, that’s definitely, “How might have this have happened for you, not to you?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And then as I’m thinking about, generally speaking, so-called “negative emotions” or I might call them unpleasant emotions, what are your thoughts with regard to, we talked about waves and letting them go through us? Different folks have different points of view in terms of, “Oh, you should just think of something positive and change the channel asap,” or, “No, no, these are important messages that you’re receiving from your ‘negative’ or unpleasant emotions. Don’t suppress them. What you resist, persists.” How do you think about this dance and game?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. So, I would definitely recommend, number one, move it through, and just move it through and then you can get back to clarity. And once you get into clarity, then you can start asking yourself the constructive question. You can kind of appreciate that what was causing, usually what causes like a pretty intense emotional response like this is the story that you’re telling about the situation.

Every kind of negative emotion that you’re having, you can always trace back to the story that you’re telling about the facts in the situation. So, that’s immediately an opportunity that you have then to start thinking about the situation in a way that is objective and not subjective. Because, usually, if you have some sort of a doubt about yourself, then you’re going to be looking to people and situations and events that happen in order to kind of decide or get information about how you’re feeling about yourself.

And so, it’s going to predispose you to look towards other people and to kind of make up narratives about what it means about you. And that totally keeps you out of your power because you’re at the mercy of other people and what they do and how they act. So, just as an example in this situation with Nikki, the story that she was initially telling is her manager doesn’t respect her. And then she just was rehashing it in her mind and kind of getting retriggered over and over again.

But when we had a chance to really think it through, I required her to tell three alternative stories about the situation, and that’s when she realized that, actually, her manager wasn’t aware of some of the work that she was doing, or maybe her manager was threatened by all the good work and visibility that she was doing. And then to tell the story of, actually, her boss was promoting these other colleagues but it was into a position that she didn’t even want.

So, you could see that once she was able to get out of that kind of taking it personally, then she was able to be more objective, and she was like, “Yeah, actually, I don’t think this even is about me. Or, if it is, then I have different options in this situation.” And so, one thing that you want to appreciate is that each of us as human beings is that, from our experiences, we may have been telling these stories along the way, and Nikki was, and she had a belief about herself that she wasn’t worthy or that she wasn’t good enough.

And so, in this situation, it’s like she had this kindling, and then the boss’ behavior was like a match, you know what I mean, that alighted her kindling, and there she was not feeling respected, not feeling worthy. But when she was able to look at it more objectively, it was like, “You know, I don’t think really that that was going on,” and that enabled her to be intentional and to create a new path for herself going forward.

And every person who’s having a negative emotion can trace that negative emotion to a story that they’re telling about a situation, and it is within your power to create the narrative, and to tell the story that’s going to enable you to show up as who you want to be and make the contribution that you’re here to make.

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

Sharon Melnick
Well, another thing that I think is very helpful for people is a lot of times I’m hearing people are getting kind of a no or a non-response, and it’s very irritating. It makes us very resentful and it just makes us feel out of our power and done to. And so, before anyone kind of stays in blame and feels like, “It’s not going to work, and I just need to leave the workplace,” or the relation, or whatever it is, I would really encourage you to consider that it may be something about your approach as much as it is about the other person being defiant or not listening.

And I’ve found my clients had just turned around situations when they’ve been getting a no, when they were able to put things in terms of what’s in it for the other person. Like, just as an example, I coached a woman who came to me, she was in a sales role, and she said, “For six years, I’ve been asking my boss for these resources, and he always give the plum assignments to the younger men, and you know what I mean, and I’m not doing well in my sales, and this is concerning. And I’m starting to feel almost like a negative victim mentality when it comes to him.”

And I said, “All good. I’ll help you find another role but let’s give it one more shot in terms of influencing him.” And she said, “He’s all about him. He manages up. He doesn’t care about me.” I said, “Look, wherever someone has a motivation, you can leverage it.” So, we just took those same requests and we phrased it in terms of what was in it for him and what he wanted, and I got an email from her, like, the very next day, tap, tap, “I got every single thing I asked for and more because it was in terms of what was in it for him.”

So, before you feel kind of out of your power, and there’s no options, and you’re just all in a swirl, and thinking you have to leave, just do a double check and make sure that you’ve been impeccable for your 50% and you’ve really thought through how to phrase it in terms of what’s in it for them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote?

Sharon Melnick
Well, this is a lead into one of the early portals in the book, but I think, “It’s never too late to be who you might’ve been.” And that’s, yeah, by George Sanchez, a pen name, actually, for an early English author, woman author.

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

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. Well, there was a study that was conducted at Harvard. I’m sure that you’ve seen this, but they took a videotape of two teams who were playing basketball. One team was wearing white shirts, another team was wearing black shirts, and they had them passing the ball amongst one another, and intermingling.

Some of you might’ve seen this because they’ve done this with hundreds of thousands of people. And during this interaction, there was someone who was dressed up in a big kind of hairy gorilla suit who walked right into the middle of this interaction, and this was all filmed. And then they had people watch this videotape and they asked them, “Did you see the gorilla?”

And fully 50% of the people was like, “There was no gorilla. No, there was no gorilla. Like, stop.” You know what I mean? Like, “Stop joshing me. No, I’m telling you, I was watching. There was no gorilla in that.” And they were like, “No, really, there was.” And I’m telling you, literally, they’ve shown this to, I think, over a half million people.

And so, the point is, and they had the people, when they were watching the video, they were supposed to count the number of passes between the people with the white shirts, so they were calling their attention to something. And the takeaway here, and they wrote a book about this, is that when you’re putting your attention on something, you are blinding yourself, really, to the whole rest of the situation and what is available to you.

And I think that that really is relevant for this idea of being in your power. Because as long as we’re focused on, “That person isn’t treating me the way that I want,” or, “They’re overlooking me,” or, “They’re doing something that’s making me take it personally,” or, “I’m blaming them,” and all of that, we’re totally missing.

In any situation, you have all of these ways of thinking and feeling and solving the problem that if you would just kind of take your myopic focus, of the thing that you’re looking at, you would see that you have so much power in the situation. And this is important for each and every one of you, because when you’re in your power, you raise everyone around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite book?

Sharon Melnick
I think a great book that’s really affected me recently is Be Your Future Self Now by Benjamin Hardy. And he talks about how we’re really guided by…we make decisions in terms of wanting to be the future self that we want to be even more than being kind of drawing our past into our current state. And I think that that gives us so much hope and shows us how much power that we have to create the life that we want to live.

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

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. Well, I think go now to www.InYourPowerBook.com because that’s where you can download right away those playlists to help you if you are in an emotional state to immediately move that through and get into a place where you’re good in you. And you can also find there, kind of the assessment. It’s just eight questions that are just going to tell you right away how much you’re in your power and exactly what you have to do to get back in your power. And if there’s anyone who resonates and really would like to do coaching with me, or bring me in to speak, SharonMelnick.com.

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

Sharon Melnick
Here’s the challenge that I want to leave you with. I want you to kind of reflect and think, as you go throughout your day, are you more like the thermometer or the thermostat? If you’re the thermometer, you’re someone who’s reacting to other people, and kind of going up and down all day long. You want to be the thermostat.

When you’re in your power, you’re the thermostat. You decide who you are. You control the situation. You bring others along in your vision. And that’s my challenge to you. Be the thermostat. Be in your power. You have more power than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Sharon, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in your power.

Sharon Melnick
Thank you.

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

Russ Poldrack
Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about habits and brain stuff, some of my favorite bits. But, first, I’m a little curious to hear about your new practice, the hour of whatever, in your lab. What’s the story here? And what has resulted from it?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, so the hour of whatever grew out of people’s, I think, and especially in the last couple of years, just feeling like we needed time to sort of connect without an agenda, no particular topics or anything. We just kind of come together and talk about whatever we want to talk about. A couple weeks ago, it was about the relative merits of raccoons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, pros and cons.

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. And sometimes it’s been slightly kind of more academic topics, like, “What happens in an academic conference?” So, it’s a chance for people to just ask any questions they want to ask. And it’s been super fun. I think as we’re all struggling to kind of come back into kind of what used to be our normal kind of social life and social being, and this is meant to kind of be an opportunity to try to help re-engage those parts of our brain that might have withered a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And so, does someone come in with a topic, or is it just sort of like, “Hey, here we are”?

Russ Poldrack
People do come in with topics but it’s also kind of a random walk at times as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick. And maybe before we go into the depths of the book, could you kick us off with some of your most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve come about in your research here?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, we’ve been interested for a long time in sort of how it is that so many different cognitive functions can be sort of crammed into the little two or three pounds of brain that sit in our head. And one of the ideas that has been around for a long time that has kind of driven a lot of the work that I’d done across my career is trying to understand how, like the brain has different systems to solve kind of related versions of different problems.

And so, one of those is actually directly related to habits. So, if you think about like what are the things that we learn as we go through the world, and I like to use driving a car as an example. So, when you drive to work, you don’t have to kind of think back and remember, “Oh, which pedal do I press to stop the car or to go?” And when we think about habits, those are often what we think about are sort of the different behaviors or the different knowledge that we build up through our experience in the world.

That’s very different than the knowledge of which particular parking spot you parked your car in this morning. That changes every day and you really have to use a different type of memory system in your brain to be able to go back and remember where you parked. And a lot of the work that we’ve done is try to figure out, “How do these different brain systems either kind of work together or even compete with one another?”

So, one of the big early findings that we had was sort of showing that these two systems, the system that kind of develops habits, and the system that helps us create these kinds of conscious memories of the past, like where we parked our car this morning, don’t just seem to be kind of working off on their own, but they actually seem to be competing with one another, such that when activity in one of those sets of brain areas goes up, activity in the other set goes down. They seem to be kind of pushing and pulling against one another.

And so, it really tells us that the brain is this big dynamical system that’s kind of got a lot of different parts that are working at the same time, and sometimes they work together, and sometimes they work across purposes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, in practice, does that mean if I am exerting some mental energy in one direction, I would expect deficits elsewhere?

Russ Poldrack
In general, that’s going to be true, yeah. And we’ve showed it to work that, to the degree that you’re engaged in, for example, multitasking, trying to do multiple things at once, that that has a bigger impact on the brain systems that are involved in generating those conscious memories of the past, and less impact on the brain systems that are involved in developing habits.

the brain has limited bandwidth, and so it’s almost necessary the case that if you’re focusing on one thing, it’s going to be at the expense of other types of information processing, and that’s going to have an impact on kind of how you do and what you remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share sort of the big idea or core thesis behind the book Hard to Break?

Russ Poldrack
Yes. So, I’d say that the big idea is really, like why are habits so hard to change? We all have habits we’d like to change. We all know how hard our behavior is to change. And I think the big idea behind the book is that behavior change is hard for a reason, and that is that habits, in general, are a really good thing. In fact, they’re essential for us to behave effectively in the world. So, if you think about what will happen if we didn’t have habits, we would be deliberating about every small act that we make, which, “Where exactly should I put my foot when I take the next step?” “Which of these ten different loaves of bread at the grocery store should I buy?”

And, obviously, some people still do deliberate about those things excessively. But habits basically allow us to offload a lot of the uninteresting stuff to what you might think of as our brain’s autopilot. When the world stays the same all the time, when we’re driving the same car every day, we don’t need to worry about where the pedals are changing, and all those old details. The habit systems in our brain basically allow us to not have to think about that stuff.

There’s a great quote from the psychologist William James, he actually wrote this in 1890, and it’s one of the most highlighted bits on Kindle in my book, which is, here’s the quote, “The great thing then in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. For this, we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.”

So, it really highlights the fact that, in general, habits are really important to us, and you wouldn’t want them to just go away easily until they become habits that are annoying, and then the stickiest of habits becomes like a real challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so given this, what do you recommend are some of the best practices for establishing new habits, and then, conversely, for breaking ones we don’t want?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, I think when it comes to establishing new habits, the real key is consistency and in some sense, setting up a schedule. So, let’s assume that we’re talking about a habit that isn’t something one necessarily loves to do, like going to the gym. One of the things to think about is to make it as easy as possible for yourself to engage in the thing. One way to think about is don’t let yourself decide whether you’re going to do that thing or not today, but really have it be just part of a schedule.

So, for example, if you wake up every day and say, “Oh, should I go to the gym today?” It’s going to be a lot easier to say no than if you just decide, “I’m going to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at the same time of day, and I’m going to sort of fix that into my larger routine.” And so, the idea is sort of taking away a little bit of your ability to decide not to do the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, burn the boats.

Russ Poldrack
Sorry, say that again?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, kind of like the burn the boats notion, like, “Oh, we can’t retreat because the boats are gone.”

Russ Poldrack
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, other sort of commitment devices or restraints. Okay.

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. Another interesting idea has come from Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth and others, this idea called temptation bundling, where basically the idea is you give yourself a small reward in exchange for doing something that you don’t want to necessarily do at least until that thing can sort of become more habitual.

So, you might, for example, say, “Every time I go to the gym, I’m going to allow myself to have a little bit of chocolate.” Angela Duckworth and her colleagues did some research where they gave people free audiobooks to listen to while they were on the treadmill, and that actually showed that it increased people’s willingness to exercise. Even something, audiobooks are fun, they’re not like eating chocolate, but even the audiobooks were enough to sort of get people to be more likely to keep going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if we’re trying to disentangle or get away from things we want to stop doing, what do you recommend there?

Russ Poldrack
So, I think one of the really important things is understanding what are the things that trigger the habit. We know that one of the things that makes a habit a habit is that it’s triggered by cues in the world. One of these, for example, you walk into a bar, you’re an ex-smoker, the smell of smoke or the other smells of the bar make you really want to have a cigarette. And almost every habit has some sort of thing that can trigger it.

And so, the first important thing is to like try to understand what the triggers are for you. They’re going to probably be different for every person. What are the triggers for you for the particular habit you’re trying to change? And then, one, can you get rid of those triggers? Can you kind of design your life to not encounter those things? Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t.

If you can, then the more you can do to avoid the triggers, the better off you are because one of the other things that’s so hard about habits is once they get triggered, they’re really hard to stop. It’s much easier to prevent them from ever happening, to prevent you from ever being triggered to do the thing than it is to stop yourself once it’s been triggered.

Now, there are some things that we know that can strengthen one’s ability to stop, and we know that the prefrontal cortex is kind of the brain’s central executive to the degree that humans can exert any control over what they do, it’s the prefrontal cortex that allows us to do that. And there are things that we know that can make the prefrontal cortex work better or worse. We know that stress has a really strong negative impact on the prefrontal cortex and one’s ability to exert control.

Lack of sleep is also a big way to sort of cause the prefrontal cortex to not function well. So, working on stress reduction, improving sleep, exercise, those are all things that we know can help improve prefrontal cortex function. People think that this stuff is all about willpower, but willpower is, in general, pretty weak. And once the habit takes off, it’s very hard for us to actually stop it.

So, one of the things that seems to work, there’s evidence showing in a number of different domains that this can help people change their behavior, is this idea of planning for what’s going to happen when the situation arises. So, psychologists call this an implementation intention. When it comes time to have to stop yourself from doing the thing, what are you going to do?

And so, instead of saying, “Oh, I’m not going to smoke,” say, “Well, when I go to the bar and my friend offers me a cigarette, this is exactly what I’m going to do in order to prevent myself from smoking at that point.” It doesn’t always work but there’s evidence that these types of planning interventions do seem to help people change their behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, my creative brain just runs wild with that because there can be an infinite number of responses. I’m thinking of like dramatic things, like you can break it into and say, “No, I have conquered nicotine forever.” Okay, that’s dramatic. Or, you can say, “Oh, no, thanks.” Or, it’s sort of like you have your script, or you’re going to, I don’t know, what the alternative to smoking are in terms of I guess there’s other nicotine delivery mechanisms.

There’s like a fuse, I don’t know what it’s called. It’s like a vape. It’s not nicotine or something. So, there can be any number of replacements. And, in fact, I was intrigued you have a chapter entitled “I forgot that I was a smoker” in your table of contents. I wanted to dig into that because we talk about those triggers. It’s kind of like some triggers are internal, like, “Hmm, when I’m bored,” which is sort of happens inside all of us daily, “I pick up my smartphone and see what’s going on in social media,” or whatever, or maybe it is a cigarette or food or drink type situations.

So, when that happens, and the triggers are internal and unavoidable, tell us what are some of the best practices? There’s strengthening of the prefrontal cortex, there’s having that implementation intention.

Russ Poldrack
Implementation intention, yeah. Another thing, so I talk a bit in the book about a bit of what we’ve learned from research on Tourette Syndrome. So, Tourette Syndrome is this disorder mostly in children where the kids have tics, and these could be vocal tics, they could be facial movement. Most kids grow out of them, some people have them into their adulthood.

And there’s a bunch of work looking at what’s called habit replacement, where the idea is like if you have something that, for example, a tic, and these tics, like a person often gets a really strong urge to like to do the thing, especially if they’re trying to prevent themselves from doing it, and finally it comes out.

So, the idea is to have some other thing that you do as a replacement, and that could be, in the context of tics, it’s often like a different movement. But you can imagine finding, for example, if you usually drink alcohol and you want to sort of not drink, finding things that are as close as possible to the thing that you would want to drink but that don’t have alcohol, or as you were talking about nicotine replacement, because those sorts of things can help break that…kind of break the link between all of the cues, like the taste of the thing and the response that you get from, for example, the alcohol.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, that person who forgot that they were a smoker, how did that go down?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, it’s a really interesting case. There’s actually a number of cases where this was an individual who had a stroke and it damaged the particular part of the brain that seems to be really important for sort of storing these types of kind of, I don’t know if you want to think of them as just cravings, but sort of like associations that we have with stuff that we want.

And, yeah, he apparently woke up after the stroke, and suddenly didn’t…after years of waking up every morning and having to have a cigarette first thing, woke up after the stroke, didn’t feel the need for a cigarette anymore. And when he was asked to describe what happened, he basically said, “Yeah, I just forgot I was a smoker.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so, yeah, that has fascinating implications, I’m sure, in your research associated with brain pathways and what’s going on there. Okay. And then you’ve got a particular recipe for stickiness in terms of getting habits to stick. What are the components of this recipe?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, so the brain has sort of brought together several different things that ultimately result in the fact that habits are really sticky.

So, the first one is that when a habit is developed, it never really goes away. As much as we might try to make it go away, what we’ve learned from a lot of research, especially research looking at rats learning habits, but we think it’s true in all organisms, is that when we have a habit and we want to try to get rid of that habit, what we have to do is, basically, push down the habit and learn a new behavior in its place. And as much as we might think that that old habit is gone, it’s always lurking there in the background. And if we get stressed out, or if the context changes, it’s likely to come back. That’s why we think habits are so likely to come back even many years later.

There’s also this thing that happens as something becomes a habit, our brain kind of moves it from initially relying on sort of parts of the brain that kind of make plans and plan out what we’re going to do, to the parts of the brain that are more involved in just doing actions. So, it’s almost like it becomes more of a hardwired action than something that we’re thinking about.

And another part of that is that we start to do lots of things together. We call this chunking in neuroscience, where initially we would have to plan out what are all the different actions we were going to do, say, to go to the store and go get some ice cream. And all of that becomes, in some sense, one bigger action.

And so, it’s easy for us to not sort of be thinking in the middle of what we’re doing. It’s almost like if the thing starts and it just kind of runs until it’s done. And then the other thing that starts to happen is that our attention starts to get driven by the things that are the sort of things in the world that are related to the habit.

So, for example, if you have a habit of eating ice cream, you might be particularly drawn to any kind of image of ice cream, anything in the store that has those features that you kind of associate with ice cream. And so, all those things come together to make it both really hard to get rid of a habit, and also really hard to prevent it from being turned on or to stop it once it’s going.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so given all of the knowledge and concepts and principles, can you share with us a few of the coolest stories you’ve encountered of folks who have put this into practice and done a fine job of creating habits or breaking habits that previously were eluding them?

Russ Poldrack
So, I think one really inspiring example for me is a friend of mine who, for a number of years, had a significant drug habit, narcotics, and was able to, ultimately, kind of hit bottom, and was able to come back. And I think one of the really impressive things that they used was really working on this kind of protecting the prefrontal cortex by doing meditation and really trying to obtain some kind of respite from all of the urges of the world and the voices that we hear. And I think that the ability to get some sort of mental clarity and really understand yourself like that really helps to think about, “How will I respond when the cues come up?”

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

Russ Poldrack
No, I think we’ve hit all the high points.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, this is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

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

Russ Poldrack
One of the things that I always like to talk about and it kind of blows people’s minds, and they don’t believe me when I tell them about it, there’s a large body of work in psychology now on what are called flashbulb memories, which are these memories that we all have where something happens. I have one, I was in college when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, and I have this crystal-clear memory of like walking into my dorm room after class, and somebody telling me, “Oh, hey, the Space Shuttle exploded.” And we all think that those are…they’re called flashbulb memories because, for many years, many people thought that they were this perfect recording of exactly what happened.

It turns out that many people get the details of these memories completely wrong. There’s been a number of studies now that have looked at people’s memories. The first one was actually for the Challenger explosion, where they went back, they had people, like the day after the explosion, say, “Where were you yesterday when you heard about the Challenger explosion?” And then they go back months later, and say, “Where were you?”

And the people often give details that are just totally wrong but they’re still so confident in those memories. And it really highlights the fact that memory is not like a tape recorder. Memory is our brain reconstructing a story about the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And could you share a favorite book?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, one that I think is really fun is called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, who’s an artist and writer. And it lays out this idea of what she calls the attention economy. It’s like the whole world is just sort of clamoring to grab our attention, and we start to think of like every moment as an opportunity to spend attention on something.

And she makes this, I think, a compelling argument, that we need to take back control of our attention, and that she refers to it as like a revolutionary act, and sort of choose to experience the world in a way that allows us to connect with other people, connect with the world around us. I think about when I was a kid, my mom would make me go to the fabric store with her, and this is before devices or anything.

And so, my brother and I would go to the fabric store with her, and we’d just sit there for 20, 30 minutes with absolutely nothing to do. And that kind of ability to tolerate boredom, like I could never go do that now, but I think that our ability to turn off our responses to the world and to…I think, mindful is a good word for it, to be more mindful about how it is that we’re engaging with the world, I think, is a really important thing.

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

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, I think the one piece of software that I use that I think is really useful is, and there’s a lot of things to do this, but I use this thing called Todoist, which is a really lightweight but effective to-do list manager. I like to try to keep my inbox, my email inbox down to one page so I can at least see everything that I immediately have to worry about.

And I’m sure you get as many emails as I do, you know how hard it is to keep everything down to about…I think my page is like 40 emails. And so, having a really good to-do list manager that integrates well with your email system is really important. And so, I find that probably my most important, like small tool that helps me stay on track.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about yourself when it comes to habits? Any favorite ones that really served you well over the years?

Russ Poldrack
I think I try to walk a lot, and I think that that’s a good thing to do both because you can’t be doing other things. Well, you can but I try not to. And I think habits, I’m trying to think habits of mind because, obviously, we all often think about our habits as being actions that we take in the world. But I think habits of mind are just as important, and I think being able to find the sweet spot where you’re almost perfectionist but not quite.
Because I think perfectionism is, at least in terms of productivity, is just a killer. I know so many people who are much more brilliant than I will ever be, sort of people who wanted to go into science but basically their perfectionism prevented them from ever getting anywhere because they were never happy enough with what they had done. And so, I think finding that sweet spot between good enough and perfect, it’s a really hard thing to learn how to do but I think, at least for me, I feel like that’s been a key to success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, it’s been underlined a bunch in the book, or you hear people quote it back to you often?

Russ Poldrack
I think the important nugget is that habits are sticky for a reason. They’re sticky because, in general, we want them to be. We don’t want to do a handstand and have our ability to see completely rewired. And I think related to that, one of the points that I often try to make about the book is that it should be a message for people to not beat themselves up when they can’t change their behavior.

Their brains were built to do exactly this, and especially our brains didn’t evolve in a world with 64-ounce sugary drinks and potato chips and drugs of the sort that one can buy either at the store or on the street. And so, our brains are really badly overpowered by the world that we live in now, and so I think that finding some compassion for one’s self around these things, I think, is really important.

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

Russ Poldrack
I’m on Twitter @russpoldrack, that’s probably the best place.

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

Russ Poldrack
I think it kind of goes back, actually, to the quote, which is to just find as many chances as you can to do something that you’re afraid of.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Russ, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun good habits.

Russ Poldrack
Many thanks. It’s been great fun.