Speaker 1: Pushkin. This special episode of the Happiness Lab is brought
Speaker 1: to you by State Farm. Like a good neighbor, State
Speaker 1: Farm is there. If you have a job, it's entirely
Speaker 1: possible that you spend more waking hours at work than
Speaker 1: doing anything else in your life, more time than you
Speaker 1: spend with your family or enjoying your hobbies, or kicking
Speaker 1: back and relaxing. Work is a big part of our lives,
Speaker 1: but aside from just paying the bills, our job can
Speaker 1: give us purpose fulfillment and a sense of belonging. One
Speaker 1: survey by the American Psychological Association found that ninety two
Speaker 1: percent of us think that our workplaces should actively support
Speaker 1: our emotional well being. But that same survey found that
Speaker 1: one in five of us describe our workplace as being toxic.
Speaker 1: And what makes a job toxic, according to that survey,
Speaker 1: those things like bullying, overwork, discrimination, and even loneliness. It's
Speaker 1: therefore no surprise that this year's World Mental Health Day
Speaker 1: was devoted to the idea of wellness in the workplace,
Speaker 1: and so in the last of our special World Mental
Speaker 1: Health Day shows, we're going to look at some recommendations
Speaker 1: to improve our happiness at work. Joining me again is
Speaker 1: Dan Harris. You probably already know Dan from his podcast
Speaker 1: ten Percent Happier, but you should also check out the
Speaker 1: fabulous new community he's developing at Dan harris dot com.
Speaker 1: Aside from being a Titan of Happiness, Dan also has
Speaker 1: lots of workplace experiences to draw from. For our conversation today,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you
Speaker 1: is that it seems like work is just gonna be
Speaker 1: hard necessarily. There's like some situations at work that are
Speaker 1: just naturally going to be hard. And one of the
Speaker 1: techniques I know I've learned a lot from your work
Speaker 1: on mindfulness is just this idea of like not fleeing
Speaker 1: from the hard, or it may be a better way
Speaker 1: to put it, is sort of radically accepting the hard.
Speaker 1: And so what is radical acceptance? And why can it
Speaker 1: be so helpful when we're experiencing stress at work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, just to say in an overarching sense of for me,
Speaker 2: one of the biggest sources of stress and anxiety and
Speaker 2: suffering has been work. Not to be overly gloomy about this,
Speaker 2: I mean work its also been the source of so
Speaker 2: much purpose and meaning and joy and connection and so
Speaker 2: it's complicated. But to answer the question you actually asked me,
Speaker 2: it's so counterintuitive because stress is unpleasant. So you know,
Speaker 2: you want to self medicate with food or gambling or
Speaker 2: TikTok or whatever it is. You want to push it away,
Speaker 2: But that doesn't really work. It can work a little bit,
Speaker 2: you know, obviously we need stress relief. But honestly, the
Speaker 2: one of the great mechanisms, or one of the great
Speaker 2: ways to think about this, is that the only way
Speaker 2: out is through to feel the difficult feelings instead of
Speaker 2: letting them own you.
Speaker 3: And there are.
Speaker 2: Lots of ways to do this. For me, mindfulness meditation
Speaker 2: is a great way. I'll just briefly describe it. There
Speaker 2: are really only three steps for beginning mindfulness meditation. The
Speaker 2: first is to sit comfortably and close your eyes. I
Speaker 2: sit on a chair. You don't have to get into
Speaker 2: the lotus position. The second step is to bring your
Speaker 2: full attention to something neutral. Often it's your breath coming
Speaker 2: in and going out. Some people don't like the breath,
Speaker 2: so you can just pick the feeling of your body
Speaker 2: sitting in the chair, or sounds in the environment. Just
Speaker 2: picking something based in one of your senses that gets
Speaker 2: you out of the spinning thoughts in your head and
Speaker 2: into some sense based object of meditation. That's a technical term. Basically,
Speaker 2: it's the thing you're focusing on, your object. And then
Speaker 2: the third step is the most important, which is very quickly.
Speaker 3: As soon as you try.
Speaker 2: To feel your breath coming in and going out, you're
Speaker 2: likely to get distracted a lot. And this is the
Speaker 2: moment when many people tell themselves this story that they're
Speaker 2: failed meditators. But actually my job on the planet is
Speaker 2: to reframe this moment as success. The whole point of
Speaker 2: meditation is not to feel some specific way or to
Speaker 2: stop thinking to clear your mind. The point is to
Speaker 2: become familiar with how wild the mind is, so that
Speaker 2: the chaos and cacophony doesn't own you as much. So
Speaker 2: that's what the practice is. The sit try to focus
Speaker 2: on one thing very quickly, you'll get carried away and
Speaker 2: you start again and again and again. It's like a
Speaker 2: bicep curl for your brain, and it really changes the
Speaker 2: structure of the brain. It's so interesting that this is
Speaker 2: something that is available to us. It's such a radical
Speaker 2: notion that we can have a different relationship to our
Speaker 2: thoughts and emotions, and so to me, this simple but
Speaker 2: not easy practice is a great way to learn how
Speaker 2: to get comfortable with our inner meteorology, you know, our
Speaker 2: inner storms, so that they don't own us as much.
Speaker 1: And so let's say your inner storm is really kind
Speaker 1: of feeling like it's owning you because your stress at
Speaker 1: work has just gone like through the roof. I was
Speaker 1: just talking to a friend of mine, this's having a
Speaker 1: really difficult time at work, and she talked about how,
Speaker 1: you know, working out as much as I possibly can,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to engage in, you know, the best
Speaker 1: sleep hygiene. Although I think we'll talk later about strategies
Speaker 1: we can use to do that better. But like I
Speaker 1: just am simmering when I leave the office. I'm just
Speaker 1: like hating work. So she's going to sit down and
Speaker 1: she's going to meditate. What does she do with all
Speaker 1: those simmering feelings? What's the advice there?
Speaker 2: Well, just to say it is very common. I've had
Speaker 2: this feeling many times. I remember in my twenty one
Speaker 2: years at working of working at ABC News, I would
Speaker 2: have this experience often of leaving there. There was a
Speaker 2: our office was in the Upper West side of Manhattan.
Speaker 2: There was a main entrance on sixty sixth Street and
Speaker 2: a back entrance on sixty seventh and I used to
Speaker 2: take that exit, and it's a very leafy upper West
Speaker 2: side street. I used to take that exit and walk
Speaker 2: to the apartment where that I shared with my now wife,
Speaker 2: And I remember having this thought every time I left
Speaker 2: and walked down this beautiful street.
Speaker 3: What was I so upset about? Why did I spend
Speaker 3: this whole day in agony? Like what is going on?
Speaker 2: And so I really relate to this experience your friend
Speaker 2: is having. And I don't want to say that meditation
Speaker 2: is some sort of panacea. I'm not a meditation bully.
Speaker 2: I think it's one of many options, and we'll talk
Speaker 2: about a bunch of options. But how it can work
Speaker 2: if you feel like doing it is that well. First
Speaker 2: of all, I find it such a relief because it's
Speaker 2: this dedicated period of time and it doesn't have to
Speaker 2: be long.
Speaker 3: It could be a minute, two minutes.
Speaker 2: I tend to do a little bit longer twenty thirty,
Speaker 2: forty minutes, but I'm like a semi professional. But it's
Speaker 2: this one concentrated period of time where you don't have
Speaker 2: to take your thoughts that seriously, and that is such
Speaker 2: a relief. Over and over and over, you're sitting trying
Speaker 2: to focus on something like the feeling of your breath
Speaker 2: coming in and going out, and then you're ambushed by
Speaker 2: all the simmering. But you know your job is to
Speaker 2: eventually wake up. You might get carried away for a minute,
Speaker 2: two minutes, three minutes with a whole session, but eventually
Speaker 2: it's gonna end, and you're gonna wake up and realize, oh,
Speaker 2: this is just a set of thoughts with accompanying physical
Speaker 2: sensations that I can get increasingly familiar with, but they
Speaker 2: aren't facts. One of the great expressions that my meditation
Speaker 2: teacher Joseph Goldstein has is pretend your thoughts are coming
Speaker 2: from the guy next to you, or from somebody you
Speaker 2: know in the apartment across the way, or from the
Speaker 2: cat that lean in the corner.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: These thoughts, which have so much control over us, are actually,
Speaker 2: as Joseph says, little more than nothing. Unexamined, they they
Speaker 2: blot out the sun. We believe them as facts, but
Speaker 2: examined for what they are, they have way less power.
Speaker 2: And so that's how sitting for me that at least
Speaker 2: in my life. That's how sitting with the simmering can work.
Speaker 2: Doesn't fix the objective facts of the situation. It can
Speaker 2: change your relationship to those facts. And by the way,
Speaker 2: the facts may not be so factual.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think sometimes we can see that through
Speaker 1: practices like meditation. I think they're for folks who struggle
Speaker 1: with meditation. There are also other techniques we can use
Speaker 1: to do that. I'm really taken by this idea of
Speaker 1: cognitive diffusion, which are all these funny ways to kind
Speaker 1: of see your thoughts as separate. I've heard a recent one,
Speaker 1: which is to take the most annoying pop song that
Speaker 1: gets stuck in your head and then sing your thoughts
Speaker 1: to that song, which is or to watch your thoughts
Speaker 1: on big Star Wars fan watch your thoughts kind of
Speaker 1: scrolling up like the text of Star Wars, so it's
Speaker 1: kind of going away. Yes, I mean, it seems like
Speaker 1: those techniques are doing exactly the kind of thing you're
Speaker 1: talking about with meditation, right, which is that you get
Speaker 1: some distance from them you can sort of see them
Speaker 1: as thoughts. But another way that meditation in particular, I
Speaker 1: maybe even more so than cognitive diffusion, can be helpful,
Speaker 1: I think, is to give some space to the simmering
Speaker 1: part that has to do less with the thoughts and
Speaker 1: more with the emotions. Right. I know my friend from
Speaker 1: dealing with these job struggles as a whole host of
Speaker 1: sets of frustration and a shed of shame that she's
Speaker 1: kind of so pissed off at her job, and like
Speaker 1: a kind of uncertainty. Right, the sort of scarcity mindset
Speaker 1: that you and I talked about in the last episode.
Speaker 1: There's just a whole host of yunky emotions that come
Speaker 1: when you're experiencing some troubles at work. How can the
Speaker 1: practice of sitting with these emotions.
Speaker 2: Be really helpful because in your.
Speaker 3: Investigation of the emotion.
Speaker 2: In other words, so you sit and you try to
Speaker 2: feel your breath and then you get overtaken by this
Speaker 2: blast of anger or regret or shame or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: And then in that moment, the move is instead of
Speaker 2: going back to the breath, just take a look at like,
Speaker 2: what's happening? What is this thing I'm calling anger? So
Speaker 2: it's a bunch of thoughts, but it's also maybe a
Speaker 2: burning in my chest, some heat in my ears, heaviness
Speaker 2: in my forehead, kind of taking with a seemingly solid,
Speaker 2: monolithic thing called anger and putting it through a cheese grater.
Speaker 2: Because you're picking it apart, you're disambiguating the constituent parts
Speaker 2: of the anger, and in this way it doesn't have
Speaker 2: as much power. You can actually see And now I'm
Speaker 2: going to get a little bit mystical with you here,
Speaker 2: but you can see that to call it your anger is,
Speaker 2: in the words of one great Buddhist monk, a misappropriation
Speaker 2: of public property.
Speaker 3: It isn't your anger.
Speaker 2: Another way to think about this, and this comes again
Speaker 2: from the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein. A little linguistic trick you
Speaker 2: can run is instead of saying I'm angry, you can
Speaker 2: say there is anger. You don't own any anger. Look
Speaker 2: close your eyes and look for anything you own in there.
Speaker 2: There's nothing you own. You are just a process, right,
Speaker 2: And so anger is a passing storm and you don't
Speaker 2: have to identify so deeply with it. You can see
Speaker 2: it as again to meteorological phenomenon that is playing out internally.
Speaker 2: And please tell me if this is making any sense.
Speaker 2: But this is how this is how I relate to
Speaker 2: all of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think you're pointing out two ways
Speaker 1: that sort of sitting with our emotions can be really helpful, right.
Speaker 1: One is kind of getting distance from the fact that
Speaker 1: they're you. There's just something that exists. But the second
Speaker 1: part is this idea of it as a process, right,
Speaker 1: that it is changing in times when I've kind of
Speaker 1: really tried to sit with certain emotions of mine. I
Speaker 1: did this recently with something I was experiencing a lot
Speaker 1: of sadness about, and I'm like, as much as I
Speaker 1: really deeply don't want to sit with this sadness, which
Speaker 1: is like sit with the sadness, and when you start,
Speaker 1: it can feel so intense. You feel like this is
Speaker 1: always going to feel this bad and this intense and
Speaker 1: this painful. And then like within four minutes of meditation,
Speaker 1: my mind is wandering off to other stuff. But I
Speaker 1: quickly come back and notice like, oh wait, I'm not
Speaker 1: experiencing the sadness as as sad anymore. My brain is
Speaker 1: like in its stream moved on to something equally stupid
Speaker 1: and made me rumutative, but it's not the sadness anymore.
Speaker 1: And then I have this moment sort of shockle like,
Speaker 1: well that's weird. Like a few seconds ago, I thought
Speaker 1: this was going to stick around forever. And so I
Speaker 1: think that's the kind of thing that I often get
Speaker 1: out of It is less the kind of making sure
Speaker 1: the anger is that sadness or whatever it's not me,
Speaker 1: because I struggle with that to kind of seem that
Speaker 1: it's not part of me. But maybe I should use
Speaker 1: this technique of there is sadness as opposed to I'm
Speaker 1: super sad right now. But what I do often is
Speaker 1: experience is like, oh, this was not nearly as permanent
Speaker 1: as I assumed this would be, This was not nearly
Speaker 1: as intractable as I assumed it would be, and that
Speaker 1: that part's been really helpful for me.
Speaker 2: That makes complete sense. And just to say, I think
Speaker 2: something that you and I have in common is we'll
Speaker 2: just throw lots of tools out there at people, and
Speaker 2: as I often say, like view it as a menu,
Speaker 2: not a to do list. Take what resonates with you
Speaker 2: and abandon what doesn't. And just to emphasize what you
Speaker 2: were saying, a less esoteric or mystical way to see
Speaker 2: the benefits of tuning into your difficult emotions is that
Speaker 2: they will pass and there's a lot of relief on
Speaker 2: the other side of that.
Speaker 1: Can I jump into an other tool in the toolkit
Speaker 1: that I know you've talked about, a technique that I
Speaker 1: know you've talked about as in terms of knowing your motivation,
Speaker 1: which I think can be especially helpful when things on
Speaker 1: the job seem just like overwhelming, you're not even sure
Speaker 1: why you work there anymore. So what is knowing your motivation?
Speaker 1: And what are some ways that we can engage in
Speaker 1: that technique?
Speaker 2: To me, this is huge and very interested after I
Speaker 2: say a few words to hear what if any science
Speaker 2: there is on this. And I'll just say from the beginning,
Speaker 2: like under, the idea of like having an intention always
Speaker 2: struck me as pretty treacly or saccharin or just didn't
Speaker 2: speak to me.
Speaker 3: And yet you know, I'm very.
Speaker 2: Definitely, deeply influenced by the Buddhist tradition or the many
Speaker 2: Buddhist traditions, and there's a lot about setting an intention
Speaker 2: in your mind, getting clear on what your motivations are,
Speaker 2: like what matters most to you as a north star
Speaker 2: that can keep you going through the inevitable ups and
Speaker 2: downs of life. And so I've spent a decent amount
Speaker 2: of time in recent years thinking about so like, what's
Speaker 2: my job. So when I wake up in the morning,
Speaker 2: I do this thing that if you told me fifteen
Speaker 2: years ago I was going to do this thing, I
Speaker 2: would have, you know, coughed my beer up through my nose.
Speaker 2: But I have this little thing I say to myself,
Speaker 2: which is my job is to make awesome shit that
Speaker 2: helps people do their lives better, and to work on
Speaker 2: the relationships in my life, including my relationship with myself.
Speaker 2: Those are my jobs, and to try to remind myself
Speaker 2: as much as possible.
Speaker 3: That that's the goal.
Speaker 2: So if my latest Instagram post didn't perform, or if
Speaker 2: my podcast numbers are dropping off, or you know, I
Speaker 2: gave a talk and it didn't go that well, or
Speaker 2: somebody I feel competitive with is kicking ass or whatever,
Speaker 2: I can maybe not be so stuck in that stuff
Speaker 2: and instead remember, like what matters. Really, the hardest part
Speaker 2: of this, even harder than figuring out what matters to you,
Speaker 2: is to remember what matters to you and so to
Speaker 2: not get so stuck in it.
Speaker 3: And so you have ways to remind yourself.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I've done that's rather
Speaker 2: extreme is to get a tattoo on my wrist right
Speaker 2: next to my watch, so that I'm looking down at
Speaker 2: my wrist all the time and I'm seeing these letters ftboab,
Speaker 2: which is pretty off brand for me in its earnestness,
Speaker 2: but it stands for and this is a Buddhist phrase
Speaker 2: for the benefit of all beings. That's my job everything
Speaker 2: I do. Every time I brush my teeth, every time
Speaker 2: I take a nap, every time I meditate, every time
Speaker 2: I do a podcast like this.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have all sorts of craven motivations that are
Speaker 2: absolutely still in there, one of them. But I as
Speaker 2: much in my life as I've told myself a story
Speaker 2: about how I'm like inherently rotten, even I have altruism
Speaker 2: in me, and I want to nurture that aspect of
Speaker 2: my inner repertoire. And so to remind myself over and
Speaker 2: over and over again it really helps me through the
Speaker 2: ups and downs of work. So is anything I'm saying
Speaker 2: like base in actual evidence?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, tons of it. I mean, first, is this
Speaker 1: idea that you're turning to your purpose like a greater purpose, right,
Speaker 1: And there's just been tons of work in positive psychology
Speaker 1: about the power of having a purpose, having a life purpose,
Speaker 1: having that kind of bigger intention, and in some ways
Speaker 1: like it doesn't fully matter what the purpose is, it's
Speaker 1: just that you kind of see it as having one.
Speaker 1: It also seems like you build in various kinds of
Speaker 1: rituals and practices to remember this. Because I thought you
Speaker 1: were going to say the hardest part is sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of remembering to do it every day
Speaker 1: right where you have to kind of do it every morning.
Speaker 1: You've kind of put together these sort of tattoos that
Speaker 1: allow you to remember to do it. Every time you
Speaker 1: see it, You're like, oh, yeah, purpose. I thought it
Speaker 1: was just my Instagram numbers, but nope, it was actually,
Speaker 1: you know, for the benefit of all beings. That's why
Speaker 1: I was doing it. So I think like the fact
Speaker 1: that you have this purpose is really important and meaningful.
Speaker 1: The fact that you remember to engage with it, But
Speaker 1: the fact that yours really is an other oriented purpose,
Speaker 1: I think gives it kind of special power and special weight.
Speaker 1: You know, there's just lots of evidence that the typical
Speaker 1: way we think about what makes us happy, which is
Speaker 1: doing for ourselves or treating yourself or self care, it
Speaker 1: just doesn't do the work that we think, like the
Speaker 1: real kind of bang for your energy and your bluck
Speaker 1: in terms of like what's going to boost your well
Speaker 1: being is taking time to do stuff for other people.
Speaker 1: I know on both of our podcasts we've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about the feel good do good effect right where
Speaker 1: it's just like, if you do stuff for others, you're
Speaker 1: going to wind up feeling better, And so making that
Speaker 1: sense of purpose not about you winds up making it
Speaker 1: easier to kind of engage with these things because then
Speaker 1: the parts that feel like it's about you, of like oh,
Speaker 1: your particular podcast numbers go down, or your talk didn't
Speaker 1: go well, it's like it's not about you. Right, if
Speaker 1: that talk resonated with one person in the big audience,
Speaker 1: then check, you know, you've done your work for the day,
Speaker 1: you can kind of feel good about it. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: So yet again the science is taking off all the
Speaker 1: all the great advice you're giving us here.
Speaker 2: What do you think about the overlap between self interest
Speaker 2: and altruism, because I feel like, a there's no bright
Speaker 2: line here, They're really interwoven in some profound ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is a like deeply mistake in
Speaker 1: theory we have just in general about happiness and well being,
Speaker 1: Like there's some pot out there of like, you know,
Speaker 1: the goodness that can happen in the world, or the
Speaker 1: happiness that we can all achieve. And I think our
Speaker 1: mistaken theory is often like, well, if I do something
Speaker 1: nice for somebody else, then there's like less overall happiness
Speaker 1: in the pot, like that happiness went to that person
Speaker 1: and then there's like less for me. But that is
Speaker 1: just like all studies show that that's just not how
Speaker 1: happiness works. It's like a growing pie. The more nice
Speaker 1: stuff we do for other people, they wind up feeling great.
Speaker 1: We wind up feeling great. That gives us more, both
Speaker 1: of us more bandwidth to do nice stuff for other people.
Speaker 1: And I think we don't have this great growing the
Speaker 1: pie model of happiness, but that's sort of how it works.
Speaker 1: I think the key, though, is that we have to
Speaker 1: kind of it's helpful to remember that the motivation isn't
Speaker 1: about us. I think when we get in the headspace
Speaker 1: of like I'm going to do nice things for other
Speaker 1: people and I'm going to do things for the better
Speaker 1: fit of all creatures because I personally want to be happy,
Speaker 1: it sort of loses something. So I think really holding
Speaker 1: on to the motivation that like it's not about you
Speaker 1: can be a profound step for ultimately, in a very
Speaker 1: ironic way, it becoming absolutely about you and your well
Speaker 1: being and your happiness. And I think this is so
Speaker 1: true at work, right. I mean, most of our workplaces
Speaker 1: offer lots of opportunities to do nice stuff for other people. Right,
Speaker 1: even if you're in the kind of worst capitalists sort
Speaker 1: of system, maybe you're creating a product that maybe somebody
Speaker 1: will enjoy, or at least you're making the shareholders some money,
Speaker 1: like they'll be happy. Right. I think we often don't
Speaker 1: frame kind of our success in business as being about
Speaker 1: other people, but so often it really is. Whether that's
Speaker 1: you know, just for the guy who works next to
Speaker 1: you on your team and kind of making his life
Speaker 1: and his job a little bit easier. I think that
Speaker 1: can be really powerful because often in many jobs there
Speaker 1: are these cases where like they're not a lot of wins,
Speaker 1: or things are going bad, but you can also often
Speaker 1: do the one nice thing for somebody next to you.
Speaker 1: You can often make their lives a little bit easier,
Speaker 1: and that can have profound effects on our own well being.
Speaker 1: When everything kind of feels like it's going bad, turning
Speaker 1: to doing one nice thing for somebody else and making
Speaker 1: their lives a little bit easier. That can often be
Speaker 1: a remedy that we don't often think about, but can
Speaker 1: be super effective at making us feel.
Speaker 3: A little bit better. Yeah, that all lands for me.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking a little bit about an expression that I
Speaker 2: heard from the Dalar Lama, and it goes to this
Speaker 2: really interesting relationship between altruism and self interest. And his
Speaker 2: expression is wise selfishness. And I like putting positive spin
Speaker 2: on selfishness because it gets such a bad rap. But
Speaker 2: his point is that we're all selfish, like nature designed
Speaker 2: us that way. But if you want to do selfishness right,
Speaker 2: you will be altruistic because it is what will lead
Speaker 2: to your greatest happiness.
Speaker 3: And I just think that's so interesting.
Speaker 2: Like there's so much pessimism abroad in the land right
Speaker 2: now about the state of humanity, cynicism really about the
Speaker 2: state of humanity and the state of the world, and
Speaker 2: I don't think that's all baseless at all. And I
Speaker 2: see the problems climate change, polarization, war, they're real, and
Speaker 2: there's so many bugs in the human design and either
Speaker 2: on the news all the time. But there's this feature
Speaker 2: which is do good, feel good Right, That we as
Speaker 2: social creatures feel good when we are useful to other people,
Speaker 2: and that's a huge deal that we can harness in
Speaker 2: our own lives and in our sense of optimism to
Speaker 2: the extent we can get there about the species, it's.
Speaker 1: Also just like the cure for so many other ills
Speaker 1: that plague us. Right, Like, so many people these days
Speaker 1: are talking about the loneliness crisis, which we experience all
Speaker 1: the time, but especially at work. Right people are reporting
Speaker 1: being lonelier at work than ever, and lots of research
Speaker 1: shows that when you self report being lonely at work,
Speaker 1: you tend to be pretty unhappy at work. But what's
Speaker 1: an incredible remedy for loneliness Trying to reach out to
Speaker 1: other people, trying to cure loneliness in somebody else. If
Speaker 1: you take the action of doing that now, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you wind up feeling less lonely doing nice
Speaker 1: People's kind of like this cure all that we can
Speaker 1: just sort of employ. It should be kind of your
Speaker 1: go to move whenever you're feeling bad about anything.
Speaker 2: Honestly, yes, service as an antidote to whatever ails us.
Speaker 1: Dan, you mentioned something really interesting that I'm sad to say,
Speaker 1: plagues a lot of my work unhappiness, which is this
Speaker 1: idea of kind of comparing yourself to other people and
Speaker 1: the really sad thing when other people in your organization
Speaker 1: or in you know, similar organizations that are doing related
Speaker 1: work do really well. Sadly, my instinct often isn't to
Speaker 1: be like, that's so great that the total happiness of
Speaker 1: the world is going off. My instinct is to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this makes me feel really crappy about myself. And I
Speaker 1: know this is something that you've tackled, and I know
Speaker 1: this is something that you have a specific meditation practice
Speaker 1: that can be really powerful for fixing over time. So
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: I'm just laughing because it's hilarious, you know, and it's
Speaker 2: so useful to hear you just say it out loud
Speaker 2: that you deal with it, because I think other people
Speaker 2: will feel like validated because it's so normal and I've
Speaker 2: dealt with a you know, I worked in television news
Speaker 2: for thirty years and saw so many people who were
Speaker 2: like you know, coming up in the newsroom at the
Speaker 2: same time as me and then just just absolutely kicked
Speaker 2: my ass and are so much better compensated and better
Speaker 2: known than.
Speaker 3: I ever got.
Speaker 2: And it, you know, I really wrestled with it, drove
Speaker 2: me nuts, and now you know, I am like you
Speaker 2: kind of in the wellness influencer space. I don't even
Speaker 2: know what the right description it is for what we do,
Speaker 2: but you know, it is very common that I'll look
Speaker 2: at somebody who maybe I have mixed feelings about who's
Speaker 2: kicking an ass, and I can, you know, feel badly
Speaker 2: about myself or feel angry at them, or feel like
Speaker 2: the world is unfair. And you know, over time, I've
Speaker 2: really started to laugh at this. It really is just
Speaker 2: an ancient program inside of me that is trying to
Speaker 2: protect me. It's trying to help me be more effective,
Speaker 2: but it's not the right way to be effective. So
Speaker 2: I kind of laugh at it and say thank you
Speaker 2: to it, but try not to let it own me.
Speaker 2: And in Buddhism, there's a specific practice for dealing with this.
Speaker 2: It's called Moudita m dta, and it's an actual meditation
Speaker 2: practice for which I believe there's been a non trivial
Speaker 2: amount of research. And the practice is you sit or
Speaker 2: lie down, begin the practice, maybe a couple deep breaths
Speaker 2: and then start by envisioning one person who is experiencing
Speaker 2: success right now, and then you send them a set
Speaker 2: of phrases like, may your happiness increase, may your health improve,
Speaker 2: may your success expand. It's the opposite of schadenfreud. You're
Speaker 2: just wishing for them to get increasingly happy. And then
Speaker 2: you move to somebody else and do it for somebody else,
Speaker 2: and then you move to another person and do it
Speaker 2: for another person. And it is so counterintuitive. It is
Speaker 2: said in the Buddhist tradition to be one of the
Speaker 2: hardest practices because you know, I'm sure we've all seen
Speaker 2: the T shirts. You know, every time a friend of
Speaker 2: mine succeeds, a little part of me dies. It is
Speaker 2: it's so natural to be jealous, but there's a way
Speaker 2: to counteract that, and there's great joy in getting good
Speaker 2: at Moodita. What you want is to become the type
Speaker 2: of person who people love to call with good news.
Speaker 3: That's who you want to be. That's who I want
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: I want to be the type of person who I
Speaker 2: love like I love people I can call when something
Speaker 2: good has happened to me.
Speaker 3: And that's why I want to be.
Speaker 2: In the latter half, of my life, and just one
Speaker 2: last thing to say about this, and I took this.
Speaker 2: I take this from the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg,
Speaker 2: who's been really instrumental in promoting practices like moodita in
Speaker 2: the West and then getting them studied in the labs.
Speaker 2: She says, there's often a misunderstanding at the heart of jealousy,
Speaker 2: which is that whatever accolade or achievement has arrived at
Speaker 2: the doorstep of your enemy was somehow headed to you,
Speaker 2: but they intercepted it. But it's almost never true, and
Speaker 2: so just leaning into the reality and just laughing at
Speaker 2: the whole system and working on developing the opposite intuition
Speaker 2: can be very helpful.
Speaker 1: I think there's also a different misconception that I talked
Speaker 1: to my students about too, which is that whatever you're
Speaker 1: feeling jealous of is inherently a really genuinely good thing
Speaker 1: with no downsides. Right. You know, the human mind sucks
Speaker 1: in part because we're constantly comparing our insides to other
Speaker 1: people's outsides, and that means we don't see the internal
Speaker 1: conflict that's going on and all the time with them,
Speaker 1: but particularly during moments of these so called successes you know,
Speaker 1: last time you and I were talking about your you know,
Speaker 1: so called career earthquake and all the stresses that you
Speaker 1: were under when you're promoting ten percent happier. I have
Speaker 1: to say, as another person in your field on the outside,
Speaker 1: I didn't see any of that. If anything, I was
Speaker 1: looking at like, oh, man, Dan's got this cool company.
Speaker 1: It's going really well. Maybe I should have started a company.
Speaker 1: Why was I sitting on it? You know, he's doing
Speaker 1: so much better than me. Meanwhile, inside, you're not sleeping,
Speaker 1: your hair's going gray, everything's going badly. And I think
Speaker 1: that this is something that the research bears out, which
Speaker 1: is that when we try to do these social comparisons,
Speaker 1: we inevitably are doing them wrong. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: studies that I tell my college students about brings college
Speaker 1: students into lab and has them guess how many good
Speaker 1: and bad things are happening to other people, So, how
Speaker 1: many freshmen are going to a cool party, or getting
Speaker 1: a really good grade, or going out on a date
Speaker 1: with somebody they found really hot or whatever. And then
Speaker 1: they also ask the students how many times did this
Speaker 1: happen to you? And what you find is that the
Speaker 1: students are constantly fantasizing that all these great things are
Speaker 1: happening to other people, when in fact, because we ask
Speaker 1: them how many times they're happening to them, we have
Speaker 1: the actual objective data on how much this is happening,
Speaker 1: and basically everybody simulating it wrong. We're assuming that like
Speaker 1: maybe twenty to thirty percent more great things are happening
Speaker 1: to people than are really happening to them. And the
Speaker 1: same thing with the bad things. We assume no bad
Speaker 1: things are happening to people. Nobody is getting a bad
Speaker 1: grade or getting dissed by somebody that thought was really
Speaker 1: hot but who didn't want to go on a date
Speaker 1: with them, et cetera, et cetera. But that effect is
Speaker 1: even bigger. We're completely getting wrong the number of bad
Speaker 1: events that others are going through. Assume that nobody's going
Speaker 1: through the bad stuff that we're going through. But yet
Speaker 1: again everybody is. And so I think this is the
Speaker 1: second misconception. It's not just that those great things that
Speaker 1: were floating around somehow missed you. It's also that those
Speaker 1: things that seem great on the outside might not be
Speaker 1: so great if you were in them yourself. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, so it's like, would you call that a
Speaker 2: kind of cognitive reappraisal or reframing to see that there's
Speaker 2: there's so many mistakes in our perception of other people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, And I think it can just
Speaker 1: you can ask yourself the question like would this actually
Speaker 1: be really good? Or are there things that I'm missing there?
Speaker 1: This is something I know we talk a lot about
Speaker 1: the Buddhist ancient traditions, but this is a spot where
Speaker 1: the Stoics, I think got it right where they said,
Speaker 1: you know, look at the gifts that come to other
Speaker 1: people and look at the work that goes into those
Speaker 1: gifts and sort of ask yourself, would you want to
Speaker 1: be the one that put in that work? And that's
Speaker 1: actually something that I come back to a lot when
Speaker 1: I'm feeling, you know, really jealous of somebody you know,
Speaker 1: or sort of you know, feeling this at the gym
Speaker 1: the other day, whereas watching a colleague of mind is
Speaker 1: started going to the gym and they got fit super fast,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh man, I'm feeling so jealous,
Speaker 1: and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Speaker 1: How many times do they go to the gym like
Speaker 1: they're running this ten K? I don't want to run
Speaker 1: a ten k. It was like, Okay, they can have
Speaker 1: their gift because I'm not willing to put in the
Speaker 1: work that i would need to do to get that gift.
Speaker 1: And I think that can be the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that we see on the job all the time, Right,
Speaker 1: people are kind of getting these accolades at work. But
Speaker 1: we might want to ask ourselves a question, is that
Speaker 1: worth my work life balance? Right? Is it worth kind
Speaker 1: of putting in that much time and energy and kind
Speaker 1: of emotional drama to kind of get the same thing
Speaker 1: that other people are getting. And when you ask yourself
Speaker 1: that question, sometimes the balance might suggest that accolade just
Speaker 1: isn't really worth it, or it's not really you in
Speaker 1: the same way that you might have expected when you
Speaker 1: were just kind of fantasizing with the usual version of
Speaker 1: social comparison.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 2: I mean just to say anecdotally on my side that
Speaker 2: in the three years since I've left the news business,
Speaker 2: every once in a while, maybe like every two or
Speaker 2: three months, I'll hear that there's a job maybe coming
Speaker 2: free or something like that in the news bi and
Speaker 2: say I'll go back to my wife and say, should
Speaker 2: I put my hat in the ring and she's like,
Speaker 2: do you do you really want to do? Like, think
Speaker 2: what would that? What would your life be like if?
Speaker 2: And then I run through that exercise and I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: I don't. I if you handed me that on silver
Speaker 2: platter right now, I wouldn't even though it probably come
Speaker 2: with a shitload of money. What that would do to
Speaker 2: my life is not worth it.
Speaker 1: And I think doing that calculation, realizing the grass isn't
Speaker 1: as green as we fantasize that it is, can be
Speaker 1: super important, right, I think, especially in this day and age,
Speaker 1: I see so much of my college students, where it
Speaker 1: used to be the case that people work for very
Speaker 1: long periods of time at one company and in one organization.
Speaker 1: I think these days it's much easier to hop on
Speaker 1: LinkedIn and just you know, jump ship whenever things aren't
Speaker 1: feeling good. And that's not to say some people are
Speaker 1: in bad situations at work. And I think we'll talk
Speaker 1: about this moving forward, that you really probably should be
Speaker 1: thinking about leaving and so on. But if the leaving
Speaker 1: is just about this sort of fantasy life about this,
Speaker 1: like you know, the grass is going to be greener
Speaker 1: at this other place, it might not actually be worth
Speaker 1: it right, And so I think kind of trying to
Speaker 1: fight that cognitive bias and really do the hard work
Speaker 1: of simulating more accurately what things are like, I think
Speaker 1: that can help you not make the mistake of sort
Speaker 1: of jumping ship when that wasn't really what was necessary.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you about a kind of resentment that
Speaker 2: I think might be justified?
Speaker 3: Please?
Speaker 2: Which is I believe And you probably have the evidence
Speaker 2: closer to hand than I do, but I believe there
Speaker 2: are just all sorts of unearned benefits that people who
Speaker 2: look like me get in the workplace. And it seems
Speaker 2: to me like the frustration that the folks who are
Speaker 2: in marginalized communities might feel that seems pretty legit and
Speaker 2: seems like in a different category from some of the
Speaker 2: envy and jealousy and fomo that you and I are
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I mean I think these are real
Speaker 1: structural inequities that exist out there, you know, just in
Speaker 1: terms of things like emotional labor that people have to do,
Speaker 1: or kind of work that's not seen, or kind of
Speaker 1: opportunities missed out on, you know, like you know, sociological
Speaker 1: study after sociological study pretty much shows that people from
Speaker 1: marginalized communities experience that more. The question is kind of
Speaker 1: how to deal with that, right, And I think that
Speaker 1: there are many ways to do this. One is to
Speaker 1: make the structural changes so that those differences don't exist
Speaker 1: and that those inequities go away. But until those structural
Speaker 1: changes are there, I think there's also lots of things
Speaker 1: that individuals can do to kind of handle this stuff.
Speaker 1: And I say that with care because sometimes when I
Speaker 1: say that, people assume I mean we'll do that instead
Speaker 1: of fixing the structural inequities. No, we got to fix
Speaker 1: the structural inequities first. But a lot of the research
Speaker 1: shows that finding good individual ways to cope with those
Speaker 1: inequities wind up making it easier for you to have
Speaker 1: the bandwidth to like fight the good fights and kind
Speaker 1: of make you workplaces more fair and so on. But
Speaker 1: in terms of the individual strategies, I think they get
Speaker 1: back to some of the things that we were talking
Speaker 1: about before, right, Like, it sucks to realize you're taking
Speaker 1: on this emotional labor. It feels frustrating, it feels should
Speaker 1: make you angry, it should make you kind of sad
Speaker 1: that that's the state of the world. These are negative
Speaker 1: emotions that we might want to find ways to allow
Speaker 1: individuals to sit with and I think to give yourself
Speaker 1: the grace to recognize that those negative emotions are there
Speaker 1: and that they're going to necessarily affect your performance right
Speaker 1: to give yourself the grace that you need to be
Speaker 1: compassionate with yourself to kind of fight these sort of things.
Speaker 1: We talked in the last episode a bit about some
Speaker 1: of Kristin Neff's work on self compassion, where recently she's
Speaker 1: just put out this new book on what she calls
Speaker 1: Fierce Self Compassion, which is this idea that like, if
Speaker 1: we're going to fight all those inequities you and I
Speaker 1: were just talking about, what we might need to do
Speaker 1: is to be kind to ourselves first. That this treating
Speaker 1: ourself like a friend, which might sign kind of wimpy
Speaker 1: or sort of not embracing, you know, the kind of real, real,
Speaker 1: kind of inequities we face with the appropriate anger that's
Speaker 1: normative in those situations. What Kristin Neff would say is like, no,
Speaker 1: by treating yourself with kindness first, it can give you
Speaker 1: the sort of fierceness that you need, that kind of
Speaker 1: bandwidth that allows for that fierceness to sort of fight
Speaker 1: some of these problems. And so yeah, I think those
Speaker 1: things are legitimate. We need to fix some of those.
Speaker 1: We also might need at the same time some individual
Speaker 1: strategies to cope with the negative emotions that come from
Speaker 1: that nasty stuff, so that we have the bandwidth to
Speaker 1: fix it down the line.
Speaker 2: That's really well said and just to jump on it.
Speaker 2: And I think a lot of people when they think
Speaker 2: about self care, self compassion, any of it, and I
Speaker 2: hear this sense that it's self indulgent to take care
Speaker 2: of yourself. But it's that's really not true. Like if
Speaker 2: you care about your colleagues and also managing work and
Speaker 2: balancing that with your home life, if you care about
Speaker 2: all of that, like it's hard to do that if
Speaker 2: you're a mess, you know, so you need to schedule
Speaker 2: and prioritize whatever self care it is that you know
Speaker 2: recharges your battery. That's not self indulgent. That's mission critical.
Speaker 1: One of those mission critical self care practices happens outside
Speaker 1: of worktime. It's sleep And I'll ask Dan about that
Speaker 1: when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. One of
Speaker 1: the mission critical self care things that I know you've
Speaker 1: talked a lot about is finding ways, even in the
Speaker 1: midst of a really stressful time at work, to make
Speaker 1: sure you're protecting your sleep. So first, maybe we walked
Speaker 1: through this a little bit last time, but can you
Speaker 1: share kind of what happened to your sleep during some
Speaker 1: of your recent career crises.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: As I mentioned in the last episode, I went through
Speaker 2: a very painful, nearly three year long separation process from
Speaker 2: my co founders at a meditation app that I was
Speaker 2: part of. Used to be called ten percent Happier, and
Speaker 2: now it's the company's called Happier. The company is still
Speaker 2: going and it's run by very cool people, and I
Speaker 2: recommend everybody go check it out.
Speaker 3: So there's no ill will there.
Speaker 2: But the separation process was very hard and for me
Speaker 2: at least, and in that process I dealt with a
Speaker 2: lot of anger and fear that led to insomnia, which
Speaker 2: of course made all of the anger and fear worse.
Speaker 2: I developed a few techniques that were helpful for me.
Speaker 2: Basic sleep hygiene. I think a lot of people know.
Speaker 2: It's helpful if the room is cold, it's helpful if
Speaker 2: you're not looking at blue light through your device in
Speaker 2: the hours leading up to going to bed. It can
Speaker 2: be helpful if you get direct sunlight early in the day.
Speaker 2: Exercise is very helpful in terms of tiring you out.
Speaker 2: So there are lots of tools that I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people are aware of.
Speaker 1: But can I jump in on that because this likes
Speaker 1: me as a big at least for me personally. This
Speaker 1: strikes me as a big case where there's cultural wisdom
Speaker 1: but not cultural practice, right, Like, I know all those things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I make the room cold, and I know
Speaker 1: I'm not supposed to look at my phone before bed,
Speaker 1: but I'm trying to get into bed. I'm ruminating about
Speaker 1: something that happened at work, and I'm using the scrolling
Speaker 1: through whatever I'm scrolling through. Often it's Reddit, which is
Speaker 1: probably the worst possible thing to be scrolling through. Often
Speaker 1: I'm using that scrolling as a way to kind of
Speaker 1: make my runative mind shut off. And of course it's
Speaker 1: really bad because Reddit's filled with all kinds of stuff
Speaker 1: that's going to make me even more anxious. Plus I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this blue light. Plus I'm sort of hyping
Speaker 1: myself up. So that's my technique. What do you actually
Speaker 1: do instead when the urge to kind of look at
Speaker 1: your digital devices sort of wins out against this sort
Speaker 1: of cultural wisdom.
Speaker 2: Your point is very well taken, and I screw this
Speaker 2: up all the time too, So I don't want to
Speaker 2: present myself as some sort of avatar of sleep hygiene perfection. However,
Speaker 2: I think for me what's been very helpful and like
Speaker 2: getting my shit together in this regard is tuning into
Speaker 2: the pain of not sleeping. I mean, it's just terrible.
Speaker 2: If I can just get in touch with how awful
Speaker 2: that is, it is a very good motivator for me
Speaker 2: to do some of the basic sleep hygiene. And more
Speaker 2: so that the two things that were very helpful for me.
Speaker 2: One is walking meditation. I often talk about seated meditation,
Speaker 2: and I've described some practices where you can sit down
Speaker 2: or lie down and do meditation. But a lot of
Speaker 2: people either don't feel like they have time for this,
Speaker 2: or if you have ADHD that you feel like you're
Speaker 2: crawling out of your skin. And so there is this
Speaker 2: very rich, multi millennia tradition of walking meditation, which I
Speaker 2: will describe very briefly. And there are lots of ways
Speaker 2: to do this, but the way I do it is
Speaker 2: I sort of stake out a patch of land in
Speaker 2: my house, maybe you know ten yards. You can do
Speaker 2: this inside or outside, but you know it's nighttime and
Speaker 2: often in the winter, so I'm doing it inside and
Speaker 2: I'm just walking back and forth. It's a long trip
Speaker 2: to nowhere. I'm walking back and forth very slowly. Now
Speaker 2: there's a way you can do this that's really really slow,
Speaker 2: that actually looks a little bit like paranormal activity or
Speaker 2: something like this.
Speaker 3: But I don't do that. I walks a zombie moved, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, which is a venerable ancient tradition, But I kind
Speaker 2: of walk somewhere between that and a normal pace, slow walk.
Speaker 2: And I'm bringing my full attention to the feeling of
Speaker 2: my body moving, and then I'm getting distracted a million
Speaker 2: times and starting again and again and again. And one
Speaker 2: thing that can help you stay focused on the sensations
Speaker 2: of your body moving is to use soft little mental
Speaker 2: notes like lifting, like lifting your foot, moving, placing, thinking, planning,
Speaker 2: just these little mental notes that and a lot of
Speaker 2: people think, well, I shouldn't be thinking in meditation, but
Speaker 2: thinking is inevitable. You can harness the thinking process to
Speaker 2: get you closer to your direct sensory experience, and that's
Speaker 2: what these little mental notes do, and you'll get distracted
Speaker 2: and you start again, and you start again. The reason
Speaker 2: why walking meditation really helps side benefit is it you know,
Speaker 2: if you're tracking your steps, it will add to your steps.
Speaker 2: For me is that my anxiety and anger often manifests
Speaker 2: as an overwhelming physical restlessness. So I'm tossing and turning
Speaker 2: in bed, and that's the worst thing you can do,
Speaker 2: because if you stay in bed and toss and turn,
Speaker 2: you're teaching the brain that the bed is a place
Speaker 2: to struggle as opposed to to sleep. So I will
Speaker 2: often do five, ten, fift teen minutes of walking meditation
Speaker 2: before bed, and if I get into bed and I'm
Speaker 2: tossing and turning, I'll get up and do more. Even
Speaker 2: though it's totally and I keep using this word counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: It's not what I actually want to do, but I
Speaker 2: know that it works. Second piece of advice is much quicker,
Speaker 2: and it goes back to this self talk refrain.
Speaker 3: It keeps coming up.
Speaker 2: I noticed that if I having trouble sleeping, I go
Speaker 2: into this catastrophizing.
Speaker 3: Tomorrow is gonna suck.
Speaker 2: And oh my god, if to get up at six
Speaker 2: and I can't sleep just I'm making these phantasma goric
Speaker 2: movies about what's going to happen now. I'm like, no, dude,
Speaker 2: you've been through this a million times. Even if you
Speaker 2: get no sleep tonight, you will be fine. You have
Speaker 2: dealt with sleeplessness before. You've always survived. It will be annoying,
Speaker 2: but you're good. So get out of bed and do
Speaker 2: your walking meditation, or get out of bed and watch TV.
Speaker 2: That actually is one of the pieces of advice. If
Speaker 2: you're struggling in bed, get up and do something fun,
Speaker 2: read a book. Sometimes I'll even just like get some
Speaker 2: work done that I was worried about I wasn't gonna
Speaker 2: get done tomorrow. When I'm totally exhausted, I get into bed,
Speaker 2: and honestly, it is not uncommon that I get into
Speaker 2: bed and I start worrying I'm not going to fall asleep,
Speaker 2: and I do fall asleep. Yeah, because it's the necessary
Speaker 2: relaxation that helps me let go into this mysterious process
Speaker 2: of sleep. So that's a long way of saying those
Speaker 2: are two hacks.
Speaker 1: I love the psycho hack in particular for the reason
Speaker 1: we were just talking about, which is like one of
Speaker 1: the reasons we need to prioritize sleep hygiene is we
Speaker 1: know how terribly crappy it is when we don't get sleep,
Speaker 1: and you care about it so much, so I can
Speaker 1: get into this terrible the same rumatative cycle where I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, it's taking forever. You know, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: up and go out, but then I'm gonna have even
Speaker 1: less time, and I'm running through my head of like
Speaker 1: all these terrible scenarios that are gonna come up. But
Speaker 1: this act of just being like, it's gonna be fine,
Speaker 1: It's okay, you've dealt with it before, Laura, you'll deal
Speaker 1: with it again. It's just so powerful but very counterintuitive
Speaker 1: to just give yourself grace for this something that it
Speaker 1: feels like you're actively screwing up, but also recognize that
Speaker 1: your body, just like sleep, is this mysterious thing that
Speaker 1: comes when it comes, and like you don't have any
Speaker 1: control over it. That's not your fault, and so just
Speaker 1: like letting that be the way it is can be
Speaker 1: also a powerful strategy.
Speaker 2: It's like creativity or looking for an idea. It's like
Speaker 2: the muse will visit, but you have to create the
Speaker 2: conditions the same with this mysterious sleep thing. Just create
Speaker 2: the conditions, and part of that is this relaxation that
Speaker 2: can be arrived at in a counterintuitive there's that word again,
Speaker 2: way of giving yourself permission for it just suck and
Speaker 2: for you not to sleep. Very interestingly, as a brief digression,
Speaker 2: many people deal with sleepiness during meditation, and so I
Speaker 2: actually think giving yourself permission to fall asleep. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: I might fall asleep and I'm not going to struggle
Speaker 2: with it. Once there's no struggle, things can happen. Once
Speaker 2: there are no expectations, things can unferl.
Speaker 1: The mind is so poorly organized sometimes it's just like
Speaker 1: by evolutionary head. I'm just like, why does the mind
Speaker 1: built on resistance for things like we get mad at
Speaker 1: ourselves and that makes it worse. It just like would
Speaker 1: be so much easier if we came with reasonable operating instructions.
Speaker 1: I just hope the next version of the mind doesn't
Speaker 1: have all these features.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, yet I agree with you all
Speaker 2: the way. And the good news is that for millennia,
Speaker 2: really smart people have been thinking about how to deal
Speaker 2: with this quirky mind that natural selection has bequeathed us.
Speaker 2: So my job and your job really is to curate
Speaker 2: and present in compelling, sticky ways all of these techniques
Speaker 2: that come out of ancient wisdom and modern science.
Speaker 3: And so that is actually really good news.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of kind of figuring out compelling ways to
Speaker 1: explain dumb things about the mind, one of the things
Speaker 1: that World Mental Health Day folks pointed out is that
Speaker 1: you know, these individual strategies, you know they're great, but
Speaker 1: that might not be the most effective kind of intervention
Speaker 1: for promoting happiness at work. We can empower people to
Speaker 1: make the best of a bad situation, but if we
Speaker 1: can make the bad situation better, that would make most
Speaker 1: things better. And for this reason, employers and managers have
Speaker 1: this big role in mental health, so says the folks
Speaker 1: who came up with World Mental Health Day. And so
Speaker 1: I'm curious about, well, your ideas for better training managers
Speaker 1: at work to support mental health and in addition to
Speaker 1: just being kind of a general good well being mindfulness guru,
Speaker 1: I know this is something that you've thought a lot
Speaker 1: about in the organizations that you've run, about how you
Speaker 1: can be sort of the best, most compassionate boss that
Speaker 1: you can be. And so tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about how you've been thinking about that and any techniques
Speaker 1: that you've brought in to do that better.
Speaker 2: Well, I want to hear your thoughts on the technique
Speaker 2: as more of like a mental health authority. I'm definitely
Speaker 2: an authority on my own experience, so I'll talk about
Speaker 2: that in terms of having screwed this up a lot
Speaker 2: as a manager, and I have made a lot of mistakes.
Speaker 2: Part of this, by way of context, is that I
Speaker 2: spent the beast bulk of my career as an anchorman
Speaker 2: where I wasn't I didn't have any direct reports.
Speaker 3: I never had any direct reports.
Speaker 2: And then I co founded this company, but I was
Speaker 2: not the CEO. I was a co founder, but somebody
Speaker 2: else was running the company and had all the direct reports.
Speaker 2: How I have my own company, and i have a
Speaker 2: lot of direct reports, and I've made a lot of mistakes,
Speaker 2: and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how
Speaker 2: to be part of the solution rather than part of
Speaker 2: the problem. In just in case anybody who works for
Speaker 2: me is listening, I know that I am not perfect,
Speaker 2: and I'm still making a lot of mistakes, but I
Speaker 2: have done a lot of work on this score. One
Speaker 2: thing I think about a lot. Is this term psychological safety,
Speaker 2: which is yet another of these terms that can sound
Speaker 2: kind of vague or gauzy or soft, but it really
Speaker 2: is a ton of hard data to show that this
Speaker 2: is the secret sauce. There was one big study done
Speaker 2: internally at Google that I'm sure you're aware of, where
Speaker 2: they were trying to figure out, like, what is the
Speaker 2: common denominator among the best performing teams in this huge corporation,
Speaker 2: And for a long time.
Speaker 3: They could not figure it out.
Speaker 2: And they finally arrived on this mysterious ingredient, which is
Speaker 2: psychological safety, which is the comfort that even the most
Speaker 2: junior person feels on any given team to speak up.
Speaker 2: And so I have spent a lot of time and
Speaker 2: continue to really struggle with this with somebody who has
Speaker 2: my employees have pointed out, has a very pronounced, resting
Speaker 2: bitch face and can be kind of scary. But really
Speaker 2: thinking hard about how can I, in meetings call on
Speaker 2: the junior people in a warm and welcoming way, make
Speaker 2: everybody feel included. Reward people who say the hard thing
Speaker 2: to me, Reward people who tell me when I'm screwing up.
Speaker 2: And I try to encourage my direct reports two tell
Speaker 2: me the truth, and then if they do, especially if
Speaker 2: they do it publicly, to call them out in a
Speaker 2: positive way and say so and so said did this
Speaker 2: very brave thing. And they told me that I was
Speaker 2: not expressing much gratitude to the team recently, and I
Speaker 2: really heard that, and I'm grateful to that person, and
Speaker 2: I'm grateful to all of you, and I'm sorry. And
Speaker 2: here's why I wasn't doing it. And so really trying
Speaker 2: to go hard at psychological safety is a big thing
Speaker 2: that I've thought about. And another thing is working on
Speaker 2: my communication skills, and this is very much related. I
Speaker 2: have spent the last six years working with these two
Speaker 2: incredible people.
Speaker 3: They're a married couple.
Speaker 2: Their names are Moudita Nisker and Dan Klerman, and they
Speaker 2: wrote a book called Let's Talk, and they developed very simple,
Speaker 2: comprehensible and comprehensive framework for communication skills in the workplace
Speaker 2: and otherwise. They've come on my show a bunch, and
Speaker 2: I also just have a phone call with them every
Speaker 2: month for six years and I've really internalized their system.
Speaker 2: And one technique that's really been helpful in my marriage
Speaker 2: and in my work life is called reflective listening. And
Speaker 2: I'm sure you know what this is, Lord, but I'll
Speaker 2: say it for the listeners. It's essentially, when somebody says
Speaker 2: something to you, you listen very carefully. Instead of planning
Speaker 2: what you're going to say next, you listen very carefully
Speaker 2: and then repeat back to them in your own words,
Speaker 2: very briefly, the bones of their message to you.
Speaker 3: And this does two things. One, it gives people.
Speaker 2: It gives your interlocutor what every human being wants desperately,
Speaker 2: although they may not know it, which is to be
Speaker 2: seen and heard. And the second thing is it's a
Speaker 2: circuit breaker on your own reflexive reactive response. You can't
Speaker 2: pop off because you have this assignment of reflecting. And
Speaker 2: so I have found that when I can do this
Speaker 2: with my colleagues, especially the junior colleagues, it really helps
Speaker 2: people relax, feel seen and valued, even if I deeply disagree.
Speaker 2: Once I reflect them into submission, and I say that
Speaker 2: with tongues slightly and cheap, I can then say the
Speaker 2: hard things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to hear. Okay,
Speaker 2: so I just threw a lot at you. How does
Speaker 2: all of that go down with you?
Speaker 1: No? No, I think it's really powerful. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: reflective listening is so powerful in part because not only
Speaker 1: does it make you not pop off, it like stops
Speaker 1: that circuit breaker, but it can stop a kind of
Speaker 1: different circuit, which is kind of misunderstanding circuit, because sometimes
Speaker 1: someone tells us something, we hear something completely different, and
Speaker 1: we're reacting and popping off not to what they meant,
Speaker 1: but what we heard. And so I've heard a kind
Speaker 1: of addition to this technique, which is an addition to
Speaker 1: kind of having use serve some in your own words,
Speaker 1: as succinctly as possible, what they just said. You sometimes
Speaker 1: follow that with did I get that right? Or did
Speaker 1: I miss anything? And that allows this sort of cyclical activity,
Speaker 1: which is like making sure we kind of understand each other,
Speaker 1: because sometimes with a junior colleague, if you do that's
Speaker 1: like oh, did I get that right? Or am I
Speaker 1: missing anything, they'll be like, well, yeah, you're actually missing
Speaker 1: this other part, which is and the second thing winds
Speaker 1: up being even more relevant, or it really changes your view.
Speaker 1: It's a reason you didn't think about before, and so on,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, so I think this iterative process of
Speaker 1: making sure you come to true understanding and true listening
Speaker 1: can be so powerful, and just having like a kind
Speaker 1: of a really quick hack to do that is important
Speaker 1: because especially in busy situations, especially in sometimes high emotion
Speaker 1: situations or kind of high fear of failure situations, like
Speaker 1: the kind of thing we find at work, I think
Speaker 1: having one of these kind of quick go to hacks
Speaker 1: of like, oh no, no, my assignment right now is
Speaker 1: to do the reflective listening thing. Let me make sure
Speaker 1: I did it right. It can just be the kind
Speaker 1: of go to that I think eases everybody's minds.
Speaker 3: You can change.
Speaker 2: I mean, think about it like we're all our own cosmos.
Speaker 2: As Walt Whitman said, right, we have this incredibly rich
Speaker 2: and complex inner life that we're not even fully aware
Speaker 2: of that's influenced by all our ancestors and by the culture,
Speaker 2: and by what happened this morning and our conversations with
Speaker 2: our spouse. Is so much going on an individual mind
Speaker 2: in a workplace, and then you are trying to communicate
Speaker 2: from your cosmos through this unbridgable divide of somebody else's
Speaker 2: cranium and cosmos, and to just honor how difficult this
Speaker 2: is and use tools that up the odds of success.
Speaker 2: I think it is a such a winning recipe, especially
Speaker 2: for people of power in organizations, because the way I
Speaker 2: think about it, and I've really tried to train myself
Speaker 2: that if there's a problem on my team, it's gonna
Speaker 2: come from me. Ultimately, the fish is always going to
Speaker 2: rot from the head, and so I've really tried to
Speaker 2: develop the reflex of taking the full responsibility for whatever's
Speaker 2: going wrong on the team, hopefully not to take it
Speaker 2: too far because sometimes things won't be my fault, but
Speaker 2: generally speaking, given how power works, that it is mostly
Speaker 2: going to be coming from me. Just a great little
Speaker 2: phrase to throw at you and for your listeners, especially
Speaker 2: listeners with power to contemplate. This comes from a great
Speaker 2: executive coach named Jerry Klonna, with whom I've also worked
Speaker 2: intensely for the last six years. This is a question
Speaker 2: to ask yourself once in a while. How am I
Speaker 2: complicit in the conditions I say I don't want? And
Speaker 2: as a manager, it's such an inconvenient question to ask yourself,
Speaker 2: but it really helps.
Speaker 1: That's huge, And I think that's huge in part because
Speaker 1: when you're with the psychological research shows is that when
Speaker 1: you're in positions of power, you sometimes can't see that complicitness,
Speaker 1: Like there's a sense in which privilege blinds you to
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. There's a really great book
Speaker 1: by the social psychologist Vanessa Bond called You Have More
Speaker 1: Influence Than You Think, and she just talks about how
Speaker 1: we're just blind to the fact that our you know,
Speaker 1: mild suggestions come off as like incredibly strong demands that
Speaker 1: people are into years about in the bathroom because we don't,
Speaker 1: as a manager, maybe realize that we've said anything that
Speaker 1: had that hold over people. And so I think that
Speaker 1: that question of really doing the reflection of could I
Speaker 1: see this from somebody else's perspective? Could I ask the
Speaker 1: question of, even if I don't realize it, what am
Speaker 1: I doing that might be contributing to the situation. It
Speaker 1: gives you a little bit of a like lens into
Speaker 1: that influence that you might be having, a lens into
Speaker 1: that complicitness that if you didn't take the time to
Speaker 1: do that reflection, you otherwise wouldn't have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Vanessa's great, and I had her on my show
Speaker 2: and she had to be a little cute a lot
Speaker 2: of influence on me through her work. But just to
Speaker 2: throw this back at you, like when the people behind
Speaker 2: World Mental Health Day talk about how, especially in a workplace,
Speaker 2: it's great to give people individual coping mechanisms, but we
Speaker 2: do want to take a look at what the structure is.
Speaker 2: Like you, oh, with it being so steeved in the research,
Speaker 2: what do you think the answers are there?
Speaker 1: Well? I think part of it is like this sort
Speaker 1: of managerial training to become better listeners, become better communicators.
Speaker 1: I think what you mentioned about psychological safety is huge.
Speaker 1: I often hear this framed both in terms of psychological safety,
Speaker 1: but also in terms of finding ways to create belonging
Speaker 1: at work, which just allows a sense of safety, a
Speaker 1: sense of trust more broadly, and so some of their
Speaker 1: recommendations are kind of about that of like what can
Speaker 1: you do to sort of focus on thriving and belonging
Speaker 1: at work? And I think a big one beyond just
Speaker 1: sort of communicating, is just finding ways to allow people
Speaker 1: to kind of connect on the job in ways that
Speaker 1: we don't expect. One of my favorite studies looking at
Speaker 1: the power of belonging comes out of Yon Emmanuel Denv's
Speaker 1: work at Oxford University. He did this big study where
Speaker 1: he partnered up with indeed and got job data on
Speaker 1: fifteen million workers at over five thousand different companies to
Speaker 1: look at what promoted happiness at work, and what he
Speaker 1: found overall was that it was people's salary. It wasn't
Speaker 1: having a good manager, it wasn't work life balance. Those
Speaker 1: things mattered, but the biggest thing that mattered the most
Speaker 1: is your sense of belonging at work, which was defined
Speaker 1: in sort of two ways. One is your sense of
Speaker 1: kind of meaning at work, like what I do matters
Speaker 1: to somebody, which ultimately is a question of like social
Speaker 1: connection and kind of mattering. But another one, which I
Speaker 1: didn't expect, was the answer to the question do you
Speaker 1: have a best friend at work? If you said yes
Speaker 1: to that, you're much more likely to say that you're
Speaker 1: happy at work. And I think this gets us to
Speaker 1: it to just a thing that we forget is important
Speaker 1: for thriving at work, which is the kind of connection
Speaker 1: that we bring to our jobs. You and I and
Speaker 1: our podcast have both talked about the importance of social connection,
Speaker 1: but we forget that like we're spending like half of
Speaker 1: our waking lives a third of our actual lives, if
Speaker 1: not more, at work, And so if we're not finding
Speaker 1: ways to build those big connections at work, then we're
Speaker 1: probably missing out on a lot of the possible, like
Speaker 1: opportunities for social connection that oftentimes people aren't getting elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And so I think kind of giving workers the opportunities
Speaker 1: to connect is something that managers could do better, but
Speaker 1: also something that would help everyone thrive because a lot
Speaker 1: of jan Emanuel Denv's work suggests that like when you
Speaker 1: can allow for social connection at work as a manager,
Speaker 1: you wind up improving everybody's performance and actually ultimately making
Speaker 1: a company more money. He actually has data from this
Speaker 1: Indeed survey that connects having a best friend at work
Speaker 1: to the stock performance of different companies. So companies that
Speaker 1: allow for more best friendships at work make the most money.
Speaker 1: And so I think this is another situation where it's
Speaker 1: kind of counterintuitive. You wouldn't think that that mattered so
Speaker 1: much for a performance, but ultimately it's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that you do that improves performance but also makes
Speaker 1: everybody feel better when they're on the job too.
Speaker 3: That's so compelling.
Speaker 2: But so what do I For example, my company, I
Speaker 2: have about ten people between working on the podcast and
Speaker 2: working on my sub stack, and there's about ten people
Speaker 2: all told, everybody's remote, how would I foster an environment
Speaker 2: where somebody could even come close to making a best
Speaker 2: friend in that environment?
Speaker 1: Yeah, One thing that folks suggest is to try to
Speaker 1: turn the virtual world into as much like the office
Speaker 1: situation like in real life as possible. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think we do badly in virtual
Speaker 1: situations is like we lose out on what would the
Speaker 1: normal social connection that would happen in a meeting type situation. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if you're in a physical office and you show up
Speaker 1: for a meeting and everybody sits around at the desks,
Speaker 1: nobody is just like silently staring forward like you might
Speaker 1: do on a Teams meeting or at a Zoom meeting.
Speaker 1: You're kind of chit chatting like oh that's a nice shirt,
Speaker 1: Like oh, how is your weekend, and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: I think we do that a little bit less in
Speaker 1: virtual environments because it's kind of just a sort of
Speaker 1: strange environment. I think it's not as psychologically rich to
Speaker 1: have these kind of connections or the things you'd naturally
Speaker 1: talk about. But a lot of workplace psychologists who focus
Speaker 1: on social connection recommend start your meeting with ten minutes
Speaker 1: of that, it might feel like you're losing out on
Speaker 1: time and you're missing out in these important opportunities to
Speaker 1: do the work of the day. But the data on
Speaker 1: best friends at work suggest that if you make those
Speaker 1: social connections, you'll wind up kind of the performance benefits
Speaker 1: that come with it. A second thing that promotes mattering
Speaker 1: is to really just kind of call out those moments
Speaker 1: where somebody does something great or somebody does something that
Speaker 1: you really appreciate. And this is especially true for the boss.
Speaker 1: So you talked about kind of being grateful when people,
Speaker 1: you know, make the hard point or say something that's
Speaker 1: really vulnerable. I think expressing that really openly and especially
Speaker 1: point about gratitude is doing that in a way with
Speaker 1: reasons of why you appreciated it so much can be
Speaker 1: really powerful. So, you know, I just want to say
Speaker 1: that I really appreciated when you brought that up. It
Speaker 1: made me think a little bit differently because the X, Y,
Speaker 1: and Z reasons and now it's actually going to cause
Speaker 1: me to do something different, and so thank you so
Speaker 1: much for bringing that up. That is just a subtle
Speaker 1: way of teaching people that what they did matters. If
Speaker 1: their performance did something it mattered to somebody else at
Speaker 1: the company. Another way to show mattering is just to
Speaker 1: kind of take into account people's day to days and
Speaker 1: ways that you might not expect. I was at a
Speaker 1: kind of corporate talk recently where I ran into a
Speaker 1: CEO who said that she US is a strategy. It
Speaker 1: is a really much bigger organization than yours. It wasn't
Speaker 1: ten people, it was like two hundred people of writing
Speaker 1: down everybody's birthday and spending the first ten minutes of
Speaker 1: the day wishing whoever's birthday. It was a happy birthday
Speaker 1: via email. And in addition to just say like happy birthday,
Speaker 1: one thing about what they've done. You know, I just
Speaker 1: want to say, hey, happy birthday. You know I noticed
Speaker 1: that you did well on the Q two orport. You know,
Speaker 1: it's great that you guys are put in so much work.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. And what she said was that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's ten minutes of the day that she could have started,
Speaker 1: you know, diving to the normal work stuff. But she'd
Speaker 1: get back at email from each of those people that
Speaker 1: got that birthday email that said, oh my god, you
Speaker 1: made my day, thanks so much. Rights person's shock that
Speaker 1: the CEO of this big company knows her birthday and
Speaker 1: is saying something nice. Those are the simple kind of
Speaker 1: psychological techniques that make people feel like it mattered that
Speaker 1: I showed up at work today, Like my behaviors on
Speaker 1: the job are making a difference for somebody, maybe not
Speaker 1: like making a profit, but like people are paying attention.
Speaker 1: And I think those kind of expressions can seem silly
Speaker 1: or they seem like they don't really matter. They're superfluous,
Speaker 1: and they take away from the real work that we
Speaker 1: have to do on the job, but psychologically that they're
Speaker 1: really important. They contribute to mattering, and they made people
Speaker 1: kind of feel like the work they do is kind
Speaker 1: of critical, that there's psyched to show up to work.
Speaker 2: I'm humbled as I listened to all this because I'm
Speaker 2: realizing that even my ten person team, that I can
Speaker 2: fall short quite severely on this, and so it's really
Speaker 2: helpful for me personally to listen to everything you've said
Speaker 2: and just I'm just remembering a story, very brief story
Speaker 2: of when my son was born almost ten years ago,
Speaker 2: and Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, sent me an
Speaker 2: email and I was like a CEA level anchorman at
Speaker 2: a very small part of Disney, you know, at ABC News,
Speaker 2: which is a tiny, tiny part of what Disney does.
Speaker 2: He sent me an email and I replied, and he replied,
Speaker 2: and I replied. We he actually took, you know, a
Speaker 2: non trivial amount of his time as the CEO of
Speaker 2: one of the biggest corporations on earth to really correspond
Speaker 2: with me about the birth of my child. And then
Speaker 2: I extrapolate from that to how often I failed to
Speaker 2: do that on my tiny team. And it's really a
Speaker 2: good learning for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's tricky, right, because those managers you're
Speaker 1: often you know, you're stressed out, you're time famished, you're like,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of running around doing all this stuff
Speaker 1: that feels like it has to get done. And I
Speaker 1: think we just need to frame the social connection mattering
Speaker 1: parts of stuff that has to get done too. And
Speaker 1: the kicker though, is that, ultimately, you know, that felt
Speaker 1: great for you that Bob sent you this email. I
Speaker 1: bet his day was made better, Right. There are these
Speaker 1: kind of win wins that we're missing out on on
Speaker 1: the job because we're not focused on this stuff. But
Speaker 1: ultimately we get kind of a kickback of that happiness
Speaker 1: boost as a manager by kind of doing more of
Speaker 1: this kind stuff and the sort of inclusive stuff for
Speaker 1: our employees too.
Speaker 3: Make you a very convincing case. Lori Scanos well.
Speaker 1: Dan, thank you so much. I'm so grateful that you
Speaker 1: took the time to chat with me. I learned something
Speaker 1: new every single time I talked to you, and I
Speaker 1: did this time as well, and so just huge gratitude,
Speaker 1: so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Likewise, I send that gratitude right back at you, and
Speaker 2: I learn a ton of listening to you, especially in
Speaker 2: these last five to seven minutes.
Speaker 3: So thank you.