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 for our special show on World Mental
Speaker 1: Health Day. I assembled a group of well being experts
Speaker 1: I like to call the Titans of Happiness, Doctor Joy
Speaker 1: Harden Bradford, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Harris, and Sesame Street's Elbow.
Speaker 2: Titans of Happiness, Doc Annoyd. What's a Titan, How's a Master?
Speaker 1: It was a super fun crew to hang out with,
Speaker 1: but most importantly, we covered a lot of ground. We
Speaker 1: gave you some of the most effective and easiest happiness
Speaker 1: hacks around. But this year's World Mental Health Day was
Speaker 1: dedicated to happiness in the workplace, a topic that's way
Speaker 1: too big to fit into just one show. So I'm
Speaker 1: bringing you another two episodes on the subject of work
Speaker 1: and well being. And I asked one of my happiness Titans,
Speaker 1: Dan Harris, to return to the show to help. And
Speaker 1: the topic of happiness at work is one that's pretty
Speaker 1: important for Dan. In fact, Dan's entire foray into the
Speaker 1: study of happiness began after a very unfortunate incident on
Speaker 1: the job.
Speaker 3: Two thousand and four, a little bit over twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: I was on Good Morning America filling in as what
Speaker 3: was called the newsreader. We don't really have this job anymore,
Speaker 3: but back then there would be somebody who would come
Speaker 3: on at the top of each hour. So the morning
Speaker 3: shows at that time went from seven to nine. And
Speaker 3: Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of Good
Speaker 3: Morning America, her job then was to come on and
Speaker 3: read a set of headlines at the top of the
Speaker 3: seven and the eight o'clock hour, and I was filling
Speaker 3: in for her on this June morning. And I had
Speaker 3: done this many times before. I wasn't nervous going in,
Speaker 3: but a few seconds into my shtick, I was supposed
Speaker 3: to read six brief news items off of the teleprompter.
Speaker 3: And by the way, I was thirty two or something
Speaker 3: like that at the time. I had for more than
Speaker 3: ten years been on television reading off of a teleprompter,
Speaker 3: so I really just to set the table here. I
Speaker 3: didn't have any idea about what was about to happen.
Speaker 3: I was not prepared, and a few seconds into my thing,
Speaker 3: I just kind of lost it. My hearts was raising,
Speaker 3: my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up, my lungs
Speaker 3: seized up.
Speaker 2: I lost the ability to.
Speaker 3: Speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're anchoring the news,
Speaker 3: and I had to kind of squeak out a back
Speaker 3: to you, Charlie and Diane. The main hosts of the
Speaker 3: show at the time were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson.
Speaker 3: And you know, I kind of got away with it
Speaker 3: in that it was if you look at it, actually,
Speaker 3: if you google panic attack on television, it's the number
Speaker 3: one result, which is my mom is very proud of that.
Speaker 2: If you look at it.
Speaker 3: For many people who especially people who've never had a
Speaker 3: panic attack before, it does look that bad. I kind
Speaker 3: of hold it together, I know when I look at it,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people, you know, my mom, who
Speaker 3: was watching live, knew exactly what was happening. But the
Speaker 3: people in the studio were concerned. But when I lied
Speaker 3: to them, and I'm not proud to admit this, but
Speaker 3: I did lie and say, yeah, you know, I don't
Speaker 3: know what happened, I'm fine, they kind of let it pass.
Speaker 3: But I actually knew exactly what had happened. I had
Speaker 3: I had had little moments of this on television before
Speaker 3: I had dealt with stage fright. For a long time,
Speaker 3: I sometimes joked that my career has been a triumph
Speaker 3: of narcissism over fear.
Speaker 2: And I really.
Speaker 3: Wanted to be on TV and I loved the job.
Speaker 3: But I did have this, you know, bedrock stage fright
Speaker 3: I had. I had, however, never had anything that strong,
Speaker 3: and so that moment turned out to be one of
Speaker 3: the seminal moments of my life.
Speaker 2: In my career too, and I met.
Speaker 1: At the moment, you didn't necessarily think that, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: at the moment, it must have felt like a profound failure,
Speaker 1: like an enormous screw up, like on live television.
Speaker 2: A million percent. Yes, that's exactly what it felt like.
Speaker 3: I felt totally humiliated and terrified that I was not
Speaker 3: going to be able to do this job anymore, that
Speaker 3: I was just going to this was going to just
Speaker 3: keep on happening. There was no silver lining in the moment,
Speaker 3: But in.
Speaker 1: The future, you were able to turn this into a
Speaker 1: huge benefit. You were able to learn from this. So
Speaker 1: tell me what kind of happened next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a
Speaker 3: long Well, nothing much happened initially, Just to you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know. You know, many of your listeners may
Speaker 3: not have been of age in two thousand and four,
Speaker 3: and for those of you who were, you may not
Speaker 3: remember this, or maybe you do. But public discussions of
Speaker 3: mental health were quite limited at that time, so it
Speaker 3: wasn't like I could turn around a week later and
Speaker 3: say I had a panic attack and I'm going to
Speaker 3: turn this into some sort of public health message that
Speaker 3: people might rally around. No, there was none of that
Speaker 3: at the time. So that's why I really felt compelled
Speaker 3: to lie, because I knew this was not the type
Speaker 3: of thing I could safely share with my bosses. What
Speaker 3: did happen is that I ended up My mother, who
Speaker 3: was watching and was at the time quite a prominent
Speaker 3: academic physician at Harvard and also very interested in her
Speaker 3: son's well being, got me in to see a shrink,
Speaker 3: a psychiatrist, and he diagnosed right away what was going
Speaker 3: on because I didn't have a sense of why this
Speaker 3: had happened. I knew it was a panic attack, but
Speaker 3: I didn't know why. And he asked me a question,
Speaker 3: which was due to drugs. I sheepishly said yes, and
Speaker 3: he didn't say this, but he gave me a look
Speaker 3: that said Okay, as whole mystery solved. Now we know
Speaker 3: what happened, just briefly, as a backstory, I had started
Speaker 3: doing cocaine after spending a lot of time in war
Speaker 3: zones after nine to eleven, and I wasn't high on
Speaker 3: the air, but it was enough that ambient drug use
Speaker 3: was enough for my shrink to change my brain chemistry
Speaker 3: and make it more likely for me to have a
Speaker 3: panic attack. So under his tutelage, I quit doing drugs
Speaker 3: and began quite intensive therapy for about ten years. And
Speaker 3: in the course of those ten years, I started getting
Speaker 3: interested in meditation, in part because of his influence, although
Speaker 3: he doesn't meditate himself, and in part because I was
Speaker 3: just reading more broadly about mental health. And so when
Speaker 3: I started getting interested in meditation, I realized there was
Speaker 3: at that time a not very well publicized, but quite
Speaker 3: robust body of scientific research that suggested that meditation could
Speaker 3: have a bunch of health benefits. And yet many of
Speaker 3: the books that I was reading about meditation didn't speak
Speaker 3: to me. I mean, I could get through it, but
Speaker 3: they were quite annoying. And so I wanted to write
Speaker 3: a book that used the F word a lot and
Speaker 3: told embarrassing stories, and so I led that the book
Speaker 3: I wrote about it, which was called ten Percent Happier,
Speaker 3: which is now ten yearsyears old. I led that book
Speaker 3: with the story of the panic attack and how it
Speaker 3: put me on this path to discovering meditation and all
Speaker 3: of the interesting things that happened after that.
Speaker 1: And so that, though, was one of only the first
Speaker 1: times that you use moments of failure to kind of
Speaker 1: learn and generate new career paths and so on. You've
Speaker 1: also had a more recent example of this, which you've
Speaker 1: referred to as your career earthquake. So I'm curious what
Speaker 1: that was and how that failure has changed things for you.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you for pointing out that I continue to
Speaker 3: fuck things up on the regular.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: This is an episode about how to fail better, and
Speaker 1: I feel like, of folks who failed pretty well, you
Speaker 1: are definitely one of my favorite examples.
Speaker 2: So I'm nailing it. I am nailing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, just one thing to say by way
Speaker 3: of context to it, because sometimes people say to me,
Speaker 3: you know, you are quite anxious for an alleged happiness
Speaker 3: expert or a quasi self help guru, and to me
Speaker 3: that gets the causality wrong. I have become an expert
Speaker 3: or a quote unquote expert in this stuff. I would say,
Speaker 3: not as much of an expert as you know, in
Speaker 3: that I'm not a scientist and I don't have a
Speaker 3: full grasp of the research in the way you do.
Speaker 3: And we'll talk about some of that coming up. But
Speaker 3: I am a flawed person. I continue to be a
Speaker 3: flawed person, and I would and I try to be
Speaker 3: open about that as a way to normalize other people's flaws.
Speaker 3: There's an expression. I don't know who said this, but
Speaker 3: this expression cathartic normalization, and that's like my whole brand.
Speaker 3: I'm just a journalist who's been meditating for a while
Speaker 3: and very interested, you know, on my own podcast, in
Speaker 3: all ways in which we can do life better. But
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean that I'm perfected, and I'm very suspicious
Speaker 3: of people who present themselves as perfect. Just to give
Speaker 3: that context for the next story that you're teaming up
Speaker 3: to tell, which is that after I wrote ten percent Happier,
Speaker 3: I did not expect it to turn into anything. I
Speaker 3: remember Barbara Walters, then a major figure in broadcast news,
Speaker 3: explicitly telling me when I told her what I was
Speaker 3: writing my book about, Don't Quit your day Job. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that gives you an idea of what the culture
Speaker 3: was like. So I didn't go into the publication of
Speaker 3: that book with anything other than fear.
Speaker 2: But I certainly I didn't think.
Speaker 3: I mean, I harbored some fantasies that it would be successful,
Speaker 3: but I didn't really think it would happen. And it
Speaker 3: just turned out that it came out at the right time,
Speaker 3: right when meditation was starting to get cool again, and
Speaker 3: right when we were starting to be more open about
Speaker 3: public health mental health issues publicly, and ABC News really
Speaker 3: got behind the book, and so it took off, which
Speaker 3: was amazing, and it led to a bunch of opportunities,
Speaker 3: including starting a meditation app which was called ten percent Happier,
Speaker 3: and so that company was around for about eight years
Speaker 3: under the name ten percent Happier. In recent years, I
Speaker 3: developed a series of interpersonal and creative and financial differences
Speaker 3: with my co founders, who are excellent people, Like, there's
Speaker 3: no bad guy in this story.
Speaker 2: You know, if there is one, maybe it's me.
Speaker 3: Just to say I take fifty percent of the responsibility
Speaker 3: at least for this failure. I do want to say
Speaker 3: that they are continuing to operate the company, So I
Speaker 3: don't want to call the company a failure.
Speaker 2: It still exists.
Speaker 3: It's called the Happier Meditation app, so it's no longer
Speaker 3: called ten percent Happier. But the separation from the company
Speaker 3: was incredibly difficult for me. I experienced a lot of
Speaker 3: anger and fear and frustration, and there were many times
Speaker 3: where I lost my temper and I was I lost
Speaker 3: my ability to sleep for several years. You know, I
Speaker 3: really took a significant toll on my mental and physical health.
Speaker 3: If you look at pictures before this, I mean, I
Speaker 3: had way fewer gray airs. So this is one of
Speaker 3: the hardest things I've ever gone through, you know, because
Speaker 3: I considered the company to be my baby, and I
Speaker 3: don't have it anymore.
Speaker 1: I think this story is really profound because it illustrates
Speaker 1: a number of the different kinds of ways that failure
Speaker 1: can affect us. I mean, a big one is just
Speaker 1: the effect that failure can have on our health. Right,
Speaker 1: Like you're not sleeping, you're not eating, like I mean,
Speaker 1: you've talked about this really blootlyate that, like you just
Speaker 1: didn't basically sleep at all for several years while this
Speaker 1: was going on. But an even bigger one that I
Speaker 1: think I hear in your story is this idea that
Speaker 1: failure can really affect our identity, like our sense of
Speaker 1: who I was. And this seems to be a big
Speaker 1: one in your story. You'd stepped away from this role
Speaker 1: being a kind of a newsperson for ABC. You became
Speaker 1: this kind of you know, co CEO of a company,
Speaker 1: and now all of a sudden that identity seems to
Speaker 1: be kind of falling apart or at least generating lots
Speaker 1: of conflict. How did you handle that?
Speaker 2: Not well?
Speaker 3: And I do want to hear some stories from you
Speaker 3: about I'm not aware of any failures and your empathy
Speaker 3: set that they've happened. I want to I do want
Speaker 3: to hear about them if you're comfortable talking about it.
Speaker 3: But I will say that you've nailed it. I mean,
Speaker 3: you're pointing at it. One of the big points of
Speaker 3: struggle for me was the identity piece of this. It
Speaker 3: was embarrassing to even though the struggle behind the scenes
Speaker 3: lasted for nearly three years, it wasn't public, but you know,
Speaker 3: the people in my life knew about it, and I
Speaker 3: knew eventually it was going to be public, and I
Speaker 3: was embarrassed. I'm supposed to be, you know, mister mindfulness,
Speaker 3: and here I am embroiled in this you know, protracted conflict.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I felt like a fraud, honestly, and I felt,
Speaker 3: you know, very helpless that I couldn't wave a magic
Speaker 3: wand and make this go away because there were two
Speaker 3: parties at the table, and we had a lot of
Speaker 3: contracts that we had signed that needed to be unwound,
Speaker 3: and I couldn't just make things happen my way. And
Speaker 3: so you know that I wasn't sleeping. I started having
Speaker 3: panic attacks again, still dealing with the reverberations of that,
Speaker 3: you know, the panic attacks this time really started to
Speaker 3: come in situations of claustrophobia, which my shrink, my current shrink,
Speaker 3: has had a field day with. And so you know,
Speaker 3: I've still struggling to get on planes and in elevators
Speaker 3: and I'm doing it.
Speaker 2: But you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3: It took a big toll, and especially on the identity front.
Speaker 3: Not only did I feel embarrassed, as you know, a
Speaker 3: mental health spokesperson of sorts, to be in this situation,
Speaker 3: but as you mentioned, I had retired from ABC News.
Speaker 3: Now about three years ago, and it was right after
Speaker 3: I retired from the news that the problems started coming
Speaker 3: up with my co founders, and so I no longer
Speaker 3: had my news anchor identity, and now this app that
Speaker 3: I had poured so much of myself into was is
Speaker 3: no longer mine. And yeah, so that's all been very challenging.
Speaker 1: But one of the reasons we're having this conversation is
Speaker 1: that you've managed to do really cool things from this
Speaker 1: moment of kind of career earthquake, and also you've learned
Speaker 1: a lot, and those are the kinds of learning so
Speaker 1: that we're going to get to when the Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: gets back from the break. Workplaces can be this sort
Speaker 1: of spot that we generate lots and lots of happiness,
Speaker 1: but they can also be these places where we experience failure.
Speaker 1: So I think kind of looking really carefully at the
Speaker 1: kinds of ways that we get failure wrong and the
Speaker 1: ways that we can benefit from failure can be really important.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the biggest teachings that it
Speaker 1: sounds like you've come up with that you've talked about
Speaker 1: on your show is this idea that even though failure
Speaker 1: is really scary and it's got all these terrible elements.
Speaker 1: It's not actually as bad as we think, like there
Speaker 1: are benefits that can come from it. Explain what you mean.
Speaker 2: There many benefits.
Speaker 3: Many as somebody who fails regularly, I can tell you
Speaker 3: there are many benefits. And I actually think that we
Speaker 3: might even want to play with that word. I don't
Speaker 3: know what an alternative is, but maybe it's something in
Speaker 3: the range of experimentation.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I think we live in a pandemic of perfectionism, and
Speaker 3: I'm sure you see this on campus with your students.
Speaker 3: Perfectionism is really on the rise, and it is such
Speaker 3: an insidious thing. People are unwilling to take risks because
Speaker 3: they don't want to fail. A part that I think
Speaker 3: this is because we live our lives so publicly on
Speaker 3: social media, this kind of panopticon we've created for ourselves
Speaker 3: where everybody can see what we're doing. We feel so
Speaker 3: much pressure to present a curated, perfected version of ourselves,
Speaker 3: when of course our lives aren't like that. And then
Speaker 3: of course we're comparing ourselves to other people's lives that
Speaker 3: seem perfect, and we know that we're a mess, and
Speaker 3: so something must be uniquely wrong with us. And one
Speaker 3: of the many, many pernicious impacts of this is that
Speaker 3: people are unwilling often to take risks and to run experiments.
Speaker 3: And a big part of running experiments and taking risks
Speaker 3: is you're going to fail. But to reframe that, there's
Speaker 3: a difference between humiliation and humility. You can be humbled
Speaker 3: in a good way in that you've learned something about
Speaker 3: yourself and about the world, as opposed to a humiliation
Speaker 3: which kind of coils you up in and thoughts about yourself,
Speaker 3: where you're stuck in shame, you're stuck in your own
Speaker 3: as I sometimes say, and I think I said this
Speaker 3: the last time I was on your show, that your
Speaker 3: head's up your ass in a in a pretty profound way.
Speaker 3: And I know that's kind of a gross image. But
Speaker 3: when you're in that mode, it's hard to learn. But
Speaker 3: when you can be in a mode of humility, or
Speaker 3: to use a term from your milia, when you've got
Speaker 3: a growth mindset, which is that you're willing to take
Speaker 3: risks and a failure doesn't mean somehow you are unworthy
Speaker 3: or perpetually incapable. It just means you learned a thing
Speaker 3: and you can grow from it. Does that all land
Speaker 3: for you, given what you know about the research.
Speaker 1: Yeah, completely. I mean I think the growth mindset idea
Speaker 1: is really quite apt, right. I think we do often
Speaker 1: enough kind of put the word yet at the end
Speaker 1: of everything we do, right, you know, I, you know,
Speaker 1: started a new meditation company and it hasn't really worked
Speaker 1: out yet, Right. I quit my job and tried to
Speaker 1: do something new in the field, but it hasn't worked
Speaker 1: out yet. You know. Carol Dweck's research suggests just putting
Speaker 1: that word yet at the end just completely reframes the
Speaker 1: way you're thinking, right, because it's not like, well, I've
Speaker 1: screwed up, you know, everything's over, I'm dead. It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it just hasn't clicked yet, Right, There's some time for
Speaker 1: this to kind of work out, and I've learned something,
Speaker 1: so I'm more likely to get it the next time
Speaker 1: because I've sort of figured it out. I think that
Speaker 1: mindset shift is kind of huge. I think another mindset
Speaker 1: shift that's really big, and it seems like one that
Speaker 1: you've embraced a bit, is just this idea that like
Speaker 1: it's actually not as bad as we think, right, that like,
Speaker 1: ultimately I'm probably going to be okay, Right, this sort
Speaker 1: of stems from some of the lovely work by Dan
Speaker 1: Gilbert and his colleagues about how bad we are what
Speaker 1: he calls affective forecasting, which is just like predicting how
Speaker 1: bad some bad event is actually going to be. We
Speaker 1: have so many mechanisms in our mind to make it
Speaker 1: go a little bit better that it's really never as
Speaker 1: bad as we often think.
Speaker 2: That's so well said.
Speaker 3: You know, we've interviewed one another many times over the years,
Speaker 3: but actually we haven't spent I don't think any time
Speaker 3: in person, so I don't know.
Speaker 2: You that well.
Speaker 3: We have this kind of I have this kind of
Speaker 3: parasocial relationship with you. But for observing you from a distance,
Speaker 3: it seems like your career is just a progress of
Speaker 3: strength to strength to strength. You know, starting this course,
Speaker 3: which is the most popular course it's ever existed at Yale,
Speaker 3: and then starting this podcast, which is so huge. But
Speaker 3: have you encountered professional setbacks that you'd be comfortable talking about, Oh.
Speaker 1: My gosh, of course. I mean one of the biggest
Speaker 1: ones was that, you know, as I was starting this
Speaker 1: big class and starting this podcast and running a residential
Speaker 1: college at Yale and doing all this work, I got
Speaker 1: incredibly burned out, Like so burned out that I wound
Speaker 1: up taking time off my role as being ahead of college,
Speaker 1: which was embarrassing for all the reasons that you just
Speaker 1: talked about. Right, I'm supposed to be the self help
Speaker 1: grow and here I am completely burned out. And the
Speaker 1: form of my burnout was a particular one, which is
Speaker 1: that I got incredibly cynical. So these clinical psychologists who
Speaker 1: talk about burnout often talk about these sort of three
Speaker 1: features of burnout is the one we usually think about
Speaker 1: where you're emotionally exhausted, And I was for sure that,
Speaker 1: right you take a weekend off and you come back
Speaker 1: Monday morning, you're just as depleted as when you'd started before,
Speaker 1: Like I was feeling that, I was also feeling what
Speaker 1: they call a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Then even if
Speaker 1: I was doing my job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't
Speaker 1: be good enough, or I wouldn't be proud of it.
Speaker 1: This is all going down kind of at the tail
Speaker 1: end of COVID, when just doing things on campus generally
Speaker 1: wasn't very fun. But the particular insidious consequence of burnout
Speaker 1: that I was experiencing that I was most embarrassed about
Speaker 1: was what researcher is called depersonalization, which is kind of
Speaker 1: just a form of cynicism, which is like everyone that
Speaker 1: you work with and care about is getting on your
Speaker 1: last nerve and you want to just explode on them
Speaker 1: all the time. You even start viewing their intentions as
Speaker 1: kind of evil or like just a pain in the ass.
Speaker 1: And this was what I was experiencing with my students.
Speaker 1: Right I'd get an email from a student who had
Speaker 1: to get a root canal and needed some money from
Speaker 1: the college to be able to do it, and my
Speaker 1: instant reaction wasn't just like true compassion for this student,
Speaker 1: which is what I like to think was the typical
Speaker 1: reaction for most of my career. My reaction was like, oh,
Speaker 1: what a pain in the ass, Like I have to
Speaker 1: send these other emails. And when I started noticing this,
Speaker 1: like at first I didn't want to tell anybody because
Speaker 1: I felt kind of like a fraud. I felt a
Speaker 1: little bit ashamed for having those emotions, right, Like, I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to be in this role where I have uttered
Speaker 1: compassion for the students in my community, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: feeling it. But I think in part because of my
Speaker 1: training in some of this stuff. I'm mindful enough to
Speaker 1: notice these signs, right, I'm like, wait a minute, this
Speaker 1: is like a huge flashing emotional signal that's not supposed
Speaker 1: to be there. That's telling me I'm overwhelmed and I
Speaker 1: need to take some time off. So yeah, at the
Speaker 1: kind of realizing that I stepped away from my role
Speaker 1: as a head of college on campus, not as public
Speaker 1: that use. It wasn't like on live TV, but I
Speaker 1: had a front page New York Times magazine article about
Speaker 1: like happiness professor burned out And got a call from
Speaker 1: my mother in law who was like, were you gonna
Speaker 1: tell us that you're like stepping away from your role
Speaker 1: and taking a year off? So yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: I think we all have our own forms of what
Speaker 1: feels like failure, what feels like us not living up
Speaker 1: to our ideals. And that was definitely a moment for
Speaker 1: me where I was feeling that way. So I can
Speaker 1: relate to the F word, but not the F word
Speaker 1: we keep talking about the failure effort.
Speaker 3: That's an incredible story. I hope this doesn't sound wrong,
Speaker 3: but I'm like proud of you for telling it. I
Speaker 3: don't mean that in a patronizing way at all. It's
Speaker 3: just it's like very brave. Other than taking time off,
Speaker 3: what helped you pull out of it?
Speaker 1: Well, taking time off was huge, and I took time
Speaker 1: off in a big way, Like I just left Yale
Speaker 1: for a year. I moved to Boston, just like Hold
Speaker 1: Up with Friends just kind of restructured my life around
Speaker 1: thinking about the podcast and stuff, but not doing a
Speaker 1: lot of my professorial work. And that changed a lot,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean therapy was part of it too, right,
Speaker 1: as like you know, as it always is, but it
Speaker 1: was really trying to focus on like what have I
Speaker 1: been telling everybody to do? And what would I tell
Speaker 1: myself in this situation? And for me, I think the difference,
Speaker 1: Whichhich kind of gets back to a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that you've talked about was that, you know, it
Speaker 1: was the normal stuff that I teach students, these behavioral changes,
Speaker 1: right like engage in more social connection and you know,
Speaker 1: exercise and try to focus on your sleep. But a
Speaker 1: lot of it was changes to my self talk, right,
Speaker 1: A lot of it was changes to kind of that
Speaker 1: crappy drill sergeant voice in my head telling me I
Speaker 1: have to be the perfect happiness expert. All the time,
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, embracing Kristin nef self compassion
Speaker 1: work in a huge, huge way, and that honestly was
Speaker 1: a lot of what has helped a lot, right and
Speaker 1: just one of the reasons I feel like I've overcome
Speaker 1: my burnout enough to kind of get back into the
Speaker 1: classroom and do more work at Yale and really kind
Speaker 1: of get back to this work in a different way.
Speaker 3: It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly
Speaker 3: modeling failure and the resilience. I just don't want that
Speaker 3: to slip by. It's awesome that you've done it and
Speaker 3: now you're back in the classroom.
Speaker 2: That's a huge deal.
Speaker 3: I also just want to, you know, plus one on
Speaker 3: the work of Kristin Nef self Compassion, which always scanned
Speaker 3: to me as a you know, I'm going to use
Speaker 3: some social justice boiler plate here, but always scanned to
Speaker 3: me as you know, as a heteronormative cis mail as
Speaker 3: beyond the pale cheesy. But you know, one of the
Speaker 3: amazing things that Kristen's done is muster a pretty convincing
Speaker 3: amount of research backing for the argument that if you
Speaker 3: can learn to talk to yourself the way you would
Speaker 3: talk to a good friend. You know, it can make
Speaker 3: you much more effective.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this on the podcast before, but I
Speaker 1: can help say. My favorite example of Kristin Nef's work
Speaker 1: that I think really shows how powerful and how not
Speaker 1: kind of wooy this sort of technique is is her
Speaker 1: lovely work showing that if you teach self compassion techniques
Speaker 1: to combat veterans, they're less likely to get PTSD. And
Speaker 1: I love the study because it gets around what I
Speaker 1: sometimes find is a challenge talking about the self compassion work,
Speaker 1: which is that it has really crappy marketing. We're being
Speaker 1: really it sounds sort of like fluffy and self compassion
Speaker 1: y and like you're going to talk to yourself like
Speaker 1: a friend. And I remember talking about this work in
Speaker 1: front of folks from the military. I was doing a
Speaker 1: talk for Navy seals and you could see the faces
Speaker 1: in the audience where I'm putting this up of like,
Speaker 1: you know, talk to yoursel it's all about self kindness,
Speaker 1: and they're rolling their eyes. But then you show the
Speaker 1: data where it's like, actually, when you train folks in
Speaker 1: the military to be a bit more mindful to kind
Speaker 1: of stop the drill sergeant in their head even though
Speaker 1: they're listening to the drill sergeant on the field. Now,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, they start performing better, they wind
Speaker 1: up healthier in the face of true conflict and really
Speaker 1: terrible circumstances. Now it starts to seem less kind of
Speaker 1: woo woo and a little bit more like sciencey and
Speaker 1: in the trenches.
Speaker 3: But absolutely, and for me it's again as somebody who's
Speaker 3: probably who's factory settings are closer to somebody who's in
Speaker 3: the military, although physically I never would have cut it
Speaker 3: in the military, but I'm a little bit, you know,
Speaker 3: psychologically closer to that. It's not so much the self kindness,
Speaker 3: the self compassion of it all sounded vaguely auto erotic
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 2: It was more like.
Speaker 3: Switching up from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach.
Speaker 3: And we've all had good coaches, and they don't shy
Speaker 3: away from pointing out where our flaws are and when
Speaker 3: we've made mistakes. But they're just not assholes about it.
Speaker 3: And that's that's what's being called for here, not some
Speaker 3: sort of gooey gooey you know, staring in the mirror
Speaker 3: and talking to yourself and kissing the mirror and talking
Speaker 3: about how great you are. It's really about having a
Speaker 3: dry eyed, clear eyed, but warm sense of self appraisal
Speaker 3: and talking yourself through it again the way you would
Speaker 3: with your kid or a good friend if they called
Speaker 3: you in a moment where they were in extremis And
Speaker 3: that's really helpful. And I would add on top of this,
Speaker 3: and I'm sure you know his work way better than
Speaker 3: I do, but I have found as a supplement to
Speaker 3: Kristin Neff's work, and this is all very relevant to
Speaker 3: how you talk to yourself and failure is Ethan Cross
Speaker 3: from the University of Michigan and all of the work
Speaker 3: he's done specifically looking at how to most effectively talk
Speaker 3: to yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just the simple way that you can do
Speaker 1: that by using your own name or as I know
Speaker 1: you do, Dan, not Dan, but dude, Hey, dude, what
Speaker 1: are you doing. It's fine, It's gonna be all right.
Speaker 1: Let's take a long view. It's probably not as bad
Speaker 1: as you think, right. Yeah, those types of techniques have
Speaker 1: been have been really really huge for me too. Another
Speaker 1: one that I know you've talked a lot about in
Speaker 1: the podcast, so I think is something that's resonated with
Speaker 1: both of our stories of failure is how you navigate
Speaker 1: negative emotions and whether you allow them in I think
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be in a healthier place than I was
Speaker 1: when I was feeling my maximill burnout right now if
Speaker 1: I didn't really allow the emotion of overwhelm, if I
Speaker 1: didn't like sit with it and notice it, which is
Speaker 1: definitely not my instinct right as like a you know,
Speaker 1: hardcore type a academic at an ivy League university. I'm
Speaker 1: a very kind of stiff upper lips, squish that emotion down.
Speaker 1: This is very inconvenient. I'm gonna ignore it and sort
Speaker 1: of power through. But like, actually noticing how depleted I
Speaker 1: was feeling, as awful as it was feeling, was sort
Speaker 1: of really essential for kind of getting better. And my
Speaker 1: understanding is that this has been part of your story too,
Speaker 1: this idea of kind of embracing those negative emotions rather
Speaker 1: than running away from them.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I'm curious, like what modalities did you use? Was
Speaker 3: it therapy, was it meditation? Did what were your practices
Speaker 3: that helped you like not be at war with your
Speaker 3: own inner reality?
Speaker 1: Partly therapy, partly a lot of this just focus on
Speaker 1: noticing what my thought patterns were. That hasn't for me
Speaker 1: come so much through like more formal meditation practices, but
Speaker 1: a lot of these sort of maybe informal self talk
Speaker 1: practices of just kind of noticing it. I think I
Speaker 1: mostly felt it in my body right. It was sort
Speaker 1: of helpful that this was during COVID time and you're
Speaker 1: sort of trapped in your house. I feel like I
Speaker 1: was able to notice my body more. I wasn't traveling
Speaker 1: around and do it. I wasn't as busy kind of
Speaker 1: as in the typical way that I was, and so
Speaker 1: it just helped to sort of notice that a little
Speaker 1: bit more. But yeah, for me, it was pretty body
Speaker 1: to just kind of feel it and notice it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that'll to me that all sounds great.
Speaker 3: I know that I'm known, as to the extent that
Speaker 3: anybody knows who I am, as kind of mister meditation,
Speaker 3: and I really am a deep believer in the power
Speaker 3: of the practice. But I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. What
Speaker 3: I would say, however, in this regard, in this particular
Speaker 3: sphere of being able to sit with your emotions, which
Speaker 3: is a really counterintuitive but powerful skill meditation for me,
Speaker 3: has been a it is a it goes right at
Speaker 3: that is it is with extreme prejudice, it goes right
Speaker 3: at this value proposition of being able to weather your
Speaker 3: own internal storms by giving you a set of tools
Speaker 3: to sit in the middle of it without being owned
Speaker 3: by it. One little phrase that might be useful that
Speaker 3: people could use as an inner slogan or a mantra
Speaker 3: in this regard, whether you meditate or not, is And
Speaker 3: this comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's, in
Speaker 3: my opinion, just a brilliant, brilliant human being, and he
Speaker 3: teaches with these little phrases, these little slogans that are
Speaker 3: kind of like earworms, and for me, they really come
Speaker 3: up in moments when I need them. And so this
Speaker 3: one is going to sound very basic and simple, but
Speaker 3: it's profound and it is this it's okay.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: This does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay
Speaker 3: to feel what you're feeling right now you can handle
Speaker 3: it instead of pushing it away, which doesn't work, or
Speaker 3: getting overwhelmed by it and acting out of it, meaning
Speaker 3: inviting in the anger and then nurturing it and living
Speaker 3: in that space for twenty years or whatever. It just
Speaker 3: means that, you know, the half life of an emotion
Speaker 3: is whatever, forty five you probably know there's like forty
Speaker 3: five seconds or something like that. We tend to make
Speaker 3: the emotion last for days, years, a lifetime. But actually,
Speaker 3: if you just tell yourself it's okay, I can feel
Speaker 3: this anger right now, it will naturally come and go
Speaker 3: and there is extraordinary freedom on the other side of it.
Speaker 2: Would you realize, Okay, I didn't do anything.
Speaker 3: I didn't say the thing that's going to ruin the
Speaker 3: next forty eight hours of my marriage. Or my son
Speaker 3: and I are in a hotel room right now, and
Speaker 3: we ordered crow nuts because we're in Vegas, and they
Speaker 3: delivered cronuts to the room, and I'm looking at a
Speaker 3: crow nut right now, And if I was angry and
Speaker 3: not aware of it or unwilling to sit with it,
Speaker 3: I might just eat the whole cronut right which again,
Speaker 3: I don't want to make food sinful or anything like that.
Speaker 3: But you can do lots of things that won't feel
Speaker 3: good ultimately, like say something pointed to somebody, or eat
Speaker 3: when you're not hungry, and instead it's okay, Like I
Speaker 3: can just feel this discomfort for forty five seconds or
Speaker 3: however long it lasts. It will pass. It'll probably come
Speaker 3: back again, but it will pass. And once it's passed,
Speaker 3: you can make better decisions and you can also see
Speaker 3: that you can survive more than you think.
Speaker 1: I love It's okay. Can I tell you my latest
Speaker 1: earworm that I'm loving a lot. It comes from the
Speaker 1: clinical psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, who has this great new book
Speaker 1: called How to Be Enough. But she says we have
Speaker 1: to go less frozen and more beetles. That when we
Speaker 1: think of dealing with our negative emotions, we want to
Speaker 1: let it go, but we have to let it be.
Speaker 1: I love this idea because I've never been a huge
Speaker 1: frozen fan. So less frozen, more beetles, not let it go,
Speaker 1: let it be, because I think this is idea is
Speaker 1: we think we'll just like get rid of those emotions
Speaker 1: or try to toss them out. But the sad thing
Speaker 1: is that the real practice is being like, Nope, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna hang out with you and I'm not gonna run.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna let you take your course. And that
Speaker 1: can be super scary, and our instinct is just to
Speaker 1: squish it down and push it away. But it's really
Speaker 1: the act of sitting through the emotion that allows us
Speaker 1: to get through it, and sometimes that allows us to
Speaker 1: see that the emotion we thought it was isn't exactly
Speaker 1: what it was. And I know this is something you
Speaker 1: talked a lot about in kind of your career Earthquake.
Speaker 1: Is that the the first presentation of a lot of
Speaker 1: the emotions you were dealing with was anger, anger at
Speaker 1: the company, anger at the situation or the contract or whatever.
Speaker 1: But what did you find out when you sat with
Speaker 1: the anger? Did it stay anger all the time?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. First of all, just to say
Speaker 3: I love Ellen Hendrickson.
Speaker 2: Two.
Speaker 3: I didn't know she had a new book, so I
Speaker 3: need to get her on my show. But she wrote
Speaker 3: a book years ago about social anxiety that I still
Speaker 3: quote to people who are struggling with that. Yes, anger,
Speaker 3: For me, when I sat with it, I realized that
Speaker 3: it's often described as a secondary emotion, as you know,
Speaker 3: so it's often covering up for something else. And for me,
Speaker 3: if I could muster the wherewithal to sit with the
Speaker 3: discomfort of the anger, I could see that underneath it
Speaker 3: was fear, and that's a hard thing. Again, It just
Speaker 3: kind of kind of goes back to how masculinity can
Speaker 3: manifest I know from men, from many men, like, we
Speaker 3: don't want to admit that we're scared, and so anger
Speaker 3: is a much more comfortable place to be. A friend
Speaker 3: of mine once joke that he had two emotional gears,
Speaker 3: anger and self pity, And I really see myself in that.
Speaker 3: But you know, as painful as it is, it's better,
Speaker 3: I think, to tune into what's really going on than
Speaker 3: to just be stuck in the anger, because you're much
Speaker 3: less likely I in my experience, to get to resolution
Speaker 3: if you stay in the anger, but to tune into
Speaker 3: the fear, Like what am I worried about? I'm worried
Speaker 3: about all the identity stuff that you brought up earlier.
Speaker 3: What is this all going to say about me? I'm
Speaker 3: worried about. Am I going to you know, am I
Speaker 3: going to have to like sell the house and move
Speaker 3: my family somewhere else? Lots of things I was worried about,
Speaker 3: and I have, you know, for me, this is actually
Speaker 3: something that makes failure such a fraught issue, especially at work.
Speaker 3: I have this, really, I think, this really deep ancestral
Speaker 3: fear of destitution and it's totally irrational. I am absolutely
Speaker 3: comfortable financially. I was raised, I have had every advantage
Speaker 3: that is available, except for maybe the fact that I'm
Speaker 3: not tall. But you know, white straight male raised by
Speaker 3: loving parents who were upper middle class, was able to
Speaker 3: go to college, all of the advantages, and yet just
Speaker 3: I have this nagging, irrational fear about running out of money.
Speaker 3: And have learned later in life that I had a
Speaker 3: great grandfather. His name is Arthur LAbau was Leebuwitz, but
Speaker 3: he changed it to Lebau because it wasn't a great
Speaker 3: place for Jews in the early nineteen hundreds and the
Speaker 3: United States wasn't and he wanted to sound French. And
Speaker 3: he was a total like huckster, and you had a
Speaker 3: series of failed businesses and that ultimately became a bail bondsman,
Speaker 3: but a corrupt one, and was putting up his family members'
Speaker 3: houses as collateral for these crooks to get out out
Speaker 3: of jail. And one of them skip bond, and this guy,
Speaker 3: the FBI swooped in, and I might I found a
Speaker 3: bunch of articles about this, Like the FBI swooped in.
Speaker 3: My great grandmother had to like testify in federal court
Speaker 3: and Arthur Lebau took his own life in the family
Speaker 3: kitchen and his daughter's found h Yeah, and that dude's
Speaker 3: energy is in my veins. And that's just the best
Speaker 3: explanation I can come up with for why I, or
Speaker 3: at least part of why this is such a bugaboo
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 2: And so in.
Speaker 3: Failure, I've had the opportunity to get a little bit
Speaker 3: closer to this dude. And and for me, what's really
Speaker 3: helpful is to be like, when I see him rearing
Speaker 3: his head.
Speaker 2: Thank you, you know, thank you? This is I don't,
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 3: You're giving me shitty ideas I'm not going to hopefully
Speaker 3: I'm not going to act on them. But the impulse
Speaker 3: is as one of the great meditation teachers I know,
Speaker 3: a guy named Jack Pornfield, the impulse is just the
Speaker 3: organism trying to protect itself.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So it fundamentally is a helpful instinct to have all
Speaker 3: this fear or to be like us hustling all the
Speaker 3: time to make sure that my career is in a
Speaker 3: good place. But over time, as I've been able to
Speaker 3: make peace with this character, internally, I'm less owned by him.
Speaker 3: It's a kind of radical disarmament. Does all of that
Speaker 3: make sense to you?
Speaker 1: No, totally. I think there are two things in there
Speaker 1: that really fit with the science, right. The first is
Speaker 1: this idea of kind of having gratitude for this belief
Speaker 1: that's otherwise kind of causing this terrible scarcity mindset, maybe
Speaker 1: because of you to make bad decisions. But if your
Speaker 1: instinct was to hate it, which I'm sure it probably
Speaker 1: is your natural instinct, but if you kind of went
Speaker 1: with that instinct to hate it and you're just angry
Speaker 1: at it the whole time, like you wouldn't ever be
Speaker 1: able to kind of look at it and allow it
Speaker 1: and see what it's doing. So kind of embracing it
Speaker 1: with gratitude is a really great strategy, right. It kind
Speaker 1: of allows you to look at it and really deal
Speaker 1: with that belief and sort of ask the question is
Speaker 1: it really useful to you? It's trying to help you,
Speaker 1: but is it really helping you? I think another really
Speaker 1: the thing I really love about this story is that
Speaker 1: by kind of putting that in Leboo's words, that it's
Speaker 1: his thought, it gives you some distance from that thought yourself. Right,
Speaker 1: You're able to think of it as like that's a belief.
Speaker 1: It's not an objective truth about the world. It's a
Speaker 1: belief that I can sort of see the origin story
Speaker 1: and you can almost label it as sort of one
Speaker 1: of his beliefs, kind of, it's your ancestral belief right
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be yours right now. You can
Speaker 1: pick and choose whether or not it's right for you.
Speaker 1: And that's a sort of classic distancing strategy that you
Speaker 1: get from cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, folks like work,
Speaker 1: like folks from Ethan Cross and so on, and so
Speaker 1: I think there's elements there that the science would really
Speaker 1: line up with that. That's a great strategy.
Speaker 3: This is why it's always so great to talk to you,
Speaker 3: because you can take my crazy shit and like give
Speaker 3: it some scientific ovind here.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 1: That's that's what the researchers would say you should do. Anyway.
Speaker 1: The final thing I want to talk to you that
Speaker 1: I was really impressed with your story about failure is
Speaker 1: this kind of optimism that you brought to it, at
Speaker 1: least sort of in the end part of the process.
Speaker 1: And you talked a lot about trying to sort of
Speaker 1: embrace this whole situation with what you called radical optimism,
Speaker 1: and so I'm curious if you could define what that
Speaker 1: means and how it sort of played out in your story.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't I could.
Speaker 3: Anybody listening to this, including you can can fact check
Speaker 3: me on this. But my understanding and really this comes
Speaker 3: from interviewing a guy named Frederick Fairt p feer Dt,
Speaker 3: who was an innovation ma is an innovation maybe in
Speaker 3: at both Stanford and Google, and he talks about radical
Speaker 3: optimism as the idea that failure and we talked about
Speaker 3: this earlier is embedded in failure is progress if you
Speaker 3: are willing to learn from it, so you can you
Speaker 3: can launch a big project and for me, like I
Speaker 3: just launched a big new project in the aftermath of
Speaker 3: ten percent happier, the app not going my way and
Speaker 3: in my sanest moments, in my most radically optimistic moment.
Speaker 3: And this isn't like, this is not irrational optimism. This
Speaker 3: is radical optimism, right, so it's actually evidence based, fact based,
Speaker 3: reality based. I can tell myself the story that this
Speaker 3: thing may not work, but I will have made progress
Speaker 3: anyway because I will have learned for the next thing.
Speaker 1: I love that this comes from like all the Stanford
Speaker 1: tech folks, because this has been kind of an ethos
Speaker 1: that has never been kind of my mom but seems
Speaker 1: to be on EMO that really works if you judge
Speaker 1: from companies like Facebook and Google and so on, which
Speaker 1: is like move fast and break things. Right. I'm cool
Speaker 1: with the move fast, like that kind of fits with
Speaker 1: my em pretty well. But the break things, I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh that, But it's like explicit in that kind of
Speaker 1: plan for how you live your life and come up
Speaker 1: with ideas and so on, and inherent in that is
Speaker 1: just the idea of what you were just saying, right,
Speaker 1: which is that like you have to break things to
Speaker 1: learn what actually works. If the thing just kind of
Speaker 1: works perfectly the first time you design it, then you
Speaker 1: haven't really learned much of anything in terms that'll matter
Speaker 1: for your kind of product working well or in the
Speaker 1: case of our own psychology, for and resilience moving forward.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say the one asterisk there is that
Speaker 3: in my understanding, at least too often in the tech world,
Speaker 3: they're breaking things and breaking people and acting you know,
Speaker 3: maybe without you know, the highest integrity sometimes And so
Speaker 3: this isn't about and I'm not saying this to you.
Speaker 3: I'm saying it just to anybody who might be tempted
Speaker 3: to misinterpret this. This isn't about you know, just being
Speaker 3: a dick, or you know, or not giving a shit
Speaker 3: about other people, or burning yourself out and other people out.
Speaker 3: It's really like moving fast and break things. The way
Speaker 3: I interpret it for myself is a willingness to fail,
Speaker 3: a willingness to try things. And yeah, this is another
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley cliche that I like to fail fast, to
Speaker 3: try a bunch of stuff and then pivot quickly. And
Speaker 3: there's this an enormous amount of resilience available to if
Speaker 3: you're open to having aired.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not to beat the crap out of yourself
Speaker 1: when you do that, right, because it's hard to fail
Speaker 1: fast if you're in the fetal position about what a
Speaker 1: loser you are. Right. The trouble with Tigingy Duden is
Speaker 1: that we cover so much ground that when I'm in
Speaker 1: the position of summing up, it feels like there's a
Speaker 1: lot to do. But I think first bullet point in
Speaker 1: my sum up list is that you and I both
Speaker 1: screw up a lot, and we like to learn from
Speaker 1: our screw ups and then share what we learn with
Speaker 1: lots of people and so thank you for helping me
Speaker 1: out with that. But it seems like among the things
Speaker 1: we've learned is that failure not as bad as we think,
Speaker 1: lots of benefits we don't expect. If you're feeling terrified
Speaker 1: about failure, that's probably just an affective forecasting error coming up.
Speaker 1: But if you need tips to deal with failure, self compassion,
Speaker 1: the catchup of all self talk strategies, it just makes
Speaker 1: everything tastier and better. We need a little bit of
Speaker 1: radical optimism so that we can kind of remember that
Speaker 1: failure is probably not just not as bad as we think,
Speaker 1: but also going to be really helpful. And beyond that,
Speaker 1: we need some strategies to kind of really allow our
Speaker 1: negative emotions and to remember that it's going to be okay.
Speaker 1: You're the career journalist. What did I forget?
Speaker 3: I think that that was a perfect sum up, and
Speaker 3: I would I did very quickly. One other thing, you know,
Speaker 3: for people wanting to navigate failure successfully is make it
Speaker 3: a team sport.
Speaker 2: You know, have people you can talk to about it.
Speaker 1: Super Dan, thanks so much for being so frank about
Speaker 1: your failure and for helping me be so frank about mine.
Speaker 1: This was an awesome episode.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Laurie. I love talking, and next.
Speaker 1: Time we're going to come back and talk more about
Speaker 1: well being at work. We're going to focus more specifically
Speaker 1: on the recommendations that came out on World Mental Health
Speaker 1: Day about what we can do as individuals and maybe
Speaker 1: also as employers to make sure we're thriving at work.