Speaker 1: How I Work is having a little breakover Easter, so
Speaker 1: I have hand picked one of my favorite episodes to
Speaker 1: play for you today and I will be back with
Speaker 1: new interviews from Thursday May one. When it comes to
Speaker 1: your work, do you have a sense of purpose and
Speaker 1: meaning that you can turn back to when things are hard?
Speaker 1: And how about your team? How connected are they to
Speaker 1: why their work matters? Doctor Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is an author,
Speaker 1: a Harvard trained physician, and the chief innovation officer at
Speaker 1: Better Up, and she thinks about these questions a lot.
Speaker 1: Her research with Professor Martin Seligman on Thriving in Times
Speaker 1: of uncertainty provides some really interesting insights into how we
Speaker 1: can keep thriving at work even when things are tough.
Speaker 1: In this episode, Gabriella shares why it is so important
Speaker 1: that you ensure your team has a sense of meaning,
Speaker 1: the five biggest drivers of resilience and they're probably not
Speaker 1: what you think they are, and why prospection is one
Speaker 1: of the most important leadership skills for the future. Welcome
Speaker 1: to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and
Speaker 1: strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha
Speaker 1: imber with her work it better up Ensuring quick, effective
Speaker 1: ways to come up with the most creative solutions is
Speaker 1: an essential part of Gabriella's day to day, so I
Speaker 1: wanted to find out what some of her go to
Speaker 1: rituals and habits are when she needs to be thinking creatively.
Speaker 2: So one of the strongest findings in creativity research around
Speaker 2: individual differences is this personality tape. That's openness to experience.
Speaker 2: So people who sort of wander around feeling wide eyed
Speaker 2: about the world, and I feel very blessed that I
Speaker 2: have that personality tape. My father's a great exact sample
Speaker 2: of that to me. He wanders around the world noticing
Speaker 2: things and asking questions, and he can have a conversation
Speaker 2: with anyone and feel genuinely curious and like you really
Speaker 2: learn something new. And I do feel that way a
Speaker 2: lot of the time. I don't take it for granted.
Speaker 2: And as I've learned more about how to help people
Speaker 2: become more creative, a lot of it is how do
Speaker 2: you grow more into embracing some of the practices that
Speaker 2: constitute openness to experience. When I'm trying to be really
Speaker 2: deliberate about this, if I'm starting on a new topic
Speaker 2: in a new area I want to learn more about.
Speaker 2: I try to read broadly about it, so I will
Speaker 2: try to get, you know, the canonical books and textbooks,
Speaker 2: but then also try to reach back into my own
Speaker 2: memory bank of things that might be tangentially related. They
Speaker 2: may not themselves end up being useful, but they might
Speaker 2: be a bridge to something else that's useful, or they
Speaker 2: might just sort of awaken a part of my brain
Speaker 2: that wasn't paying attention to the topic that now can
Speaker 2: be engaged and connecting. And when we think about the
Speaker 2: default mode network, which is this daydreaming network, it's where
Speaker 2: all these rich ideas about creativity come from, somewhat non
Speaker 2: consciously and spontaneously. We know that it's putting ideas together,
Speaker 2: it's associating and creating these sort of moments of what
Speaker 2: we call in our book integration integrative creativity. And the
Speaker 2: richer we can fertilize the soil of that default network
Speaker 2: with thinking broadly, with new experiences, with curiosity leading us
Speaker 2: around unpredictable corners, the more surprising those associations can be,
Speaker 2: and therefore the more creative. So that's some of what
Speaker 2: I think I naturally do and understanding the science has
Speaker 2: helped me make sense of why that's useful.
Speaker 1: What else do you do, particularly when you've got a
Speaker 1: really tight timeline, as is often the case with work projects,
Speaker 1: what you need to think creatively, have the kind of
Speaker 1: different ways of flipping that creative each on the daring
Speaker 1: tych lung.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I love to source ideas from lots of
Speaker 2: different people. So I have people I'll go to in
Speaker 2: my network who again might be very directly related or
Speaker 2: maybe tangentially related, or maybe it's just like a very
Speaker 2: close friend that I know will always take my call
Speaker 2: and talk to me about something. And as we do that,
Speaker 2: we're now opening up think about the network and how
Speaker 2: it's exponentially growing with every person that we talk to
Speaker 2: in the nodes they're able to access. So now the
Speaker 2: surface area of those ideas has just grown so much
Speaker 2: so quickly. Through that, one of the ideas we plant
Speaker 2: for leaders in the book is can you bring into
Speaker 2: a brainstorm with your team someone who's a really divergent,
Speaker 2: out of the box thinker in general, just someone who
Speaker 2: can push, even in a time limited way, they can
Speaker 2: really push the ceiling of what's an acceptable level of divergence.
Speaker 2: For the people in the room, to get them to
Speaker 2: go a little more out of their comfort zone, get
Speaker 2: a little bit bolder with their ideas. Those are often
Speaker 2: the kinds of people I might reach out to and
Speaker 2: just get them thinking about things. And look, people like puzzles.
Speaker 2: We like to solve puzzle. So if you can position
Speaker 2: your creative challenge as a puzzle, people want to get
Speaker 2: engaged and think about it, and they might email you
Speaker 2: two weeks later with a new ideas a Gabrielle.
Speaker 1: It's something that I often do when I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think creatively is I will just take myself away from
Speaker 1: my computer screen, which is generally where I'm trying to
Speaker 1: type my ideas into, and I will just go for
Speaker 1: a walk and it will be a technology free walk,
Speaker 1: just to force my brain to just be expansive and
Speaker 1: you know, not constrained to just the incoming stimulus that
Speaker 1: might be On the podcast, I'm listening to what science
Speaker 1: is there behind that approach? And if there is science,
Speaker 1: I'm curious, is this something you do as well?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and yes. So I'll start with the science
Speaker 2: and then I'll tell you about how I do it.
Speaker 2: So now there's three networks involved in in creativity, the
Speaker 2: department network which I mentioned this daydreaming network, the executive
Speaker 2: control network, which is the network that's sort of I
Speaker 2: tell you to remember the name of the street you
Speaker 2: grew up on. That's the one that helps you do that.
Speaker 2: And then we have the salience network, which is sort
Speaker 2: of like when you hear a siren in the background.
Speaker 2: It's the one that gets you to pay attention that
Speaker 2: it draws your attention from one thing to another. So
Speaker 2: we think that the way this works is something like
Speaker 2: the following. You get a creative challenge at work, you
Speaker 2: start working on it with the executive control network with
Speaker 2: your team, put it aside, you go out and you
Speaker 2: grab your lunch. Now your daydreaming network's working on it.
Speaker 2: Even when you're not consciously trying to. You might have
Speaker 2: a surprising association that comes up that's actually quite useful.
Speaker 2: Your salience network picks it up, says, ah aha, there's
Speaker 2: an important idea here. Let's pay attention. And it brings
Speaker 2: it back to the executive control network. When we are
Speaker 2: too digitally connected and we're checking our email and we're
Speaker 2: on messengers and we're checking the news, we're staying in
Speaker 2: the executive control network. We're not letting ourselves get into
Speaker 2: the default mode network where that daydreaming happens. The richest
Speaker 2: daydreaming happens when we're on autopilot. As an executive control network,
Speaker 2: we are active, so we're not just lying and staring
Speaker 2: at the ceiling, but we're not using our kind of
Speaker 2: working memory. We're not paying close attention to something, so
Speaker 2: you can have what you just describe, that beautiful sense
Speaker 2: of daydreaming and kind of flow my whole life, I
Speaker 2: have practiced observing a twenty four hour technology sabbath, from
Speaker 2: sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday. We do
Speaker 2: that in my family. It's I think, been really helpful
Speaker 2: in creating a less dependency on devices. But for sure,
Speaker 2: the richness of the thinking and the ideas that happen
Speaker 2: when you can unplug from devices is really powerful. And
Speaker 2: you know, it's one of the many ways in which
Speaker 2: these devices are changing the ways we function as human
Speaker 2: beings in a way that is not how we evolved,
Speaker 2: and it's in some ways depriving us of some of
Speaker 2: these really rich, meaningful, beautiful experiences that just got interrupted
Speaker 2: by the constant busyness of the divisis.
Speaker 1: Trying a digital sabbath is something I've experimented with, and
Speaker 1: I don't do it for a twenty four hour period,
Speaker 1: but on the times where I've done it for several hours,
Speaker 1: it's quite amazing just how your brain opens up in
Speaker 1: ways that just don't seem possible when you're connected, particularly
Speaker 1: to your phone. You know, so much of the day.
Speaker 1: Something I would love to delve into is around purpose
Speaker 1: and meaning and mattering. And I found this such an
Speaker 1: interesting part of tomorrow Mind because I feel like most
Speaker 1: companies talk a lot about purpose these days. But then
Speaker 1: I loved the things that you said around meaning and mattering.
Speaker 1: So to start, can you just share what those three
Speaker 1: concepts are, and then we might delve deeper into them.
Speaker 2: So meaning is what my coatho Marty Salomon calls a
Speaker 2: flabby concept.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: There's a lot of different meanings to the word meaning.
Speaker 2: The psychologist Michael Steger has this definition that there's three
Speaker 2: different components to meaning. There's purpose, there's coherence, and there's significance.
Speaker 2: So significance is that my life has meaning. There's some
Speaker 2: significance to me being here. Coherence is this idea that
Speaker 2: there's a greater integrity of my actions with something larger
Speaker 2: that it all somehow fits together. And purpose is that
Speaker 2: there's something bigger than I'm kind of working toward and
Speaker 2: pushing for. Mattering is what we think of as like
Speaker 2: a very bare minimum level of significance, whereby I feel
Speaker 2: that the labor I'm putting out there in the world
Speaker 2: is for a purpose. It's seen and it's not fornt
Speaker 2: and at a clinical psychological level. And people lose a
Speaker 2: sense of mattering, they can't even get out of bed
Speaker 2: to start the day, right, So the extreme end of
Speaker 2: not mattering is depression in the workplace. Some of our professions,
Speaker 2: some of our labors are meaningful in a colloquial sense
Speaker 2: of they might be attached to, let's say, as a
Speaker 2: healthcare provider saving a person's life, and some of us
Speaker 2: are doing labors that feel much more removed from immediate
Speaker 2: meaningful impact for other human beings, for sense of integrity,
Speaker 2: for service to the planet. As managers, whatever we're asking
Speaker 2: people to do, we need them to be able to
Speaker 2: feel that their labors have registered to us, that they matter,
Speaker 2: that we see them doing that thing that is the
Speaker 2: bare minimum of a person continuing to be motivated, to
Speaker 2: keep putting in the effort day after day. And in
Speaker 2: this day and age when we are as managers are
Speaker 2: very often asking people, Hey, that thing that you work
Speaker 2: so hard on for six months, remember that, stop doing
Speaker 2: that thing and start doing this totally different thing because
Speaker 2: the industry change, the world changed, what the market change,
Speaker 2: whatever it was. That's a crisis of mattering. That's a
Speaker 2: crisis where the employee is asked themselves, why did I
Speaker 2: just do that for six months? And why is it
Speaker 2: going to matter for me to do this next thing?
Speaker 2: So that's where we define the sort of bare minimum
Speaker 2: of what a manager needs to do to help people
Speaker 2: stay motivated, and really what we owe people if we're
Speaker 2: asking them to work on something, we owe it to
Speaker 2: them to witness that work and to have it be
Speaker 2: seen and to have them feel that that was not
Speaker 2: all for not How.
Speaker 1: Do you approach that as a later in terms of
Speaker 1: remembering that, Because there's so much to remember and to
Speaker 1: do to be a great leader these days, I feel
Speaker 1: like their responsibilities are greater than ever. It seems very basic,
Speaker 1: but I can imagine that a lot of ladies don't
Speaker 1: do it. How do you think about it in your role.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by the way, I think about it all the
Speaker 2: time and every time I share this insight and this
Speaker 2: idea of as managers, when we ask people to pivot,
Speaker 2: I think about at that exact moment, where am I
Speaker 2: asking my team to pivot and where do I need
Speaker 2: to remind to go back and do this. So I
Speaker 2: do try to pay attention to it most at these
Speaker 2: pivot moments. I try to pay attention to it. When
Speaker 2: we are reading out on metrics and performance. You know
Speaker 2: that's a moment where your team might miss a metric,
Speaker 2: but it might be a for a reason that was
Speaker 2: out of their control or despite the fact that there
Speaker 2: was a lot of effort that was put in, And
Speaker 2: so how do you witness the effort? How do you
Speaker 2: witness the intent even while helping the team grow and
Speaker 2: evolve to the next chapter. So I try to narrate
Speaker 2: the utility of the effort as much as I can
Speaker 2: when I know that we're shifting away from or trying
Speaker 2: to learn something about where it could be better, because
Speaker 2: I know that's when it's the threat happens. And then
Speaker 2: in general, when we have good hygiene and good practices
Speaker 2: around recognition, which is something I think, you know, all
Speaker 2: of us can get better at. But recognition is an antidote,
Speaker 2: and it's almost a vaccine for a crisis of mattering.
Speaker 2: If people feel your someone who's recognizing them and who's
Speaker 2: seeing what they're doing, then they'll be more trusting about
Speaker 2: leaving something behind and going to something.
Speaker 1: Now, we'd love to talk about resilience because when I
Speaker 1: was reading Tomorrow Mind, I thought, gosh, Gabriella must be
Speaker 1: the most resilient person with everything she knows about it.
Speaker 1: And I was really fascinated by the model that is
Speaker 1: in the book around the five biggest drivers to resilience,
Speaker 1: because I think that they're a little bit surprising. They're
Speaker 1: different to I think what pop psychology puts out there,
Speaker 1: and I'd love to go into some of them. And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, for listeners that thinking, what are
Speaker 1: these five things? So there's emotional regulation, which I would
Speaker 1: love to start on. There's optimism, there's cognitive agility, self compassion,
Speaker 1: and self efficacy. And I am curious because all of
Speaker 1: those variables if you like things that we can shift
Speaker 1: in ourselves as humans, which is why I love it
Speaker 1: because it suggests that anyone can be significantly more resilient
Speaker 1: by just practicing the right things, if you like, within
Speaker 1: a relatively short space of time. So emotional regulation, I
Speaker 1: feel like, even as an adult, this is something that
Speaker 1: I struggle is particularly in times of intense stress at work,
Speaker 1: and I would love to know what do you do,
Speaker 1: What have you found works for yourself in terms of
Speaker 1: emotional regulation.
Speaker 2: I think for myself and for all of us, this
Speaker 2: is an ongoing area of development that very seldom does
Speaker 2: a human being feel they've mastered emotional regulation. And I
Speaker 2: would say most of the time they feel that they're
Speaker 2: not correct. So if you feel you have work to
Speaker 2: do here, you are not alone. And it is really
Speaker 2: a lifelong journey, and I think it's one of the
Speaker 2: things that constitutes wisdom, and you know, something that we
Speaker 2: gain their experience in learning and seeing ups and downs
Speaker 2: and knowing that it's going to ultimately be okay. I
Speaker 2: will tell you one of the more important learnings for
Speaker 2: me about resilience and emotional regulation in the last five
Speaker 2: years or so, when a number of very significant things
Speaker 2: have happened in my life personally, is remembering knowing that
Speaker 2: the people who are most resilient it's still really hard
Speaker 2: when those things happen. Initially, that resilience doesn't mean it
Speaker 2: doesn't feel incredibly painful and challenging, and you may cry,
Speaker 2: and you may scream, and you may be furious, and
Speaker 2: all of those emotions. They're big and they're negative, and
Speaker 2: people who are resilient still have them, especially when things
Speaker 2: are really hard. Where the growth comes from, and the
Speaker 2: extreme side of resilience is this idea of post traumatic
Speaker 2: growth or anti fragility, that we can actually grow stronger
Speaker 2: through those experiences is how we metabolize it, how we
Speaker 2: make meaning from it, and how we come back more
Speaker 2: centered and grounded as a result of that. And it
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that it doesn't still hurt in the moment.
Speaker 2: So that's one thing that I use to comfort myself
Speaker 2: around that and to give myself grace space to have
Speaker 2: those emotions. I also do a lot for myself around time.
Speaker 2: So the moment the news happens is incredibly painful, that
Speaker 2: the hour, two hour, day afterward, But if we can
Speaker 2: intellectually remind ourselves that even another day later, even another
Speaker 2: three hours later, it's going to get better, it's a
Speaker 2: source of reassurance and optimism, and it helps keep me
Speaker 2: from kind of spinning out. There's the emotion and then
Speaker 2: there's this spinning out about emotion, and so these strategies
Speaker 2: are what helped me stay grounded in the emotion itself
Speaker 2: rather than exacerbating it with my emotions about the emotion.
Speaker 1: Something you write about, I think in the book or
Speaker 1: possibly on a blog on Better app is the feelings
Speaker 1: wheel where and I find this so helpful. I find
Speaker 1: this particularly helpful for my ten year old daughter as well,
Speaker 1: where just the act of actually naming what feeling I
Speaker 1: am experiencing actually helps to kind of tull that experience,
Speaker 1: which is quite helpful when you're experiencing an intense negative emotion.
Speaker 1: Is that something that you have used yourself? I do.
Speaker 2: I particularly use it with negative emotion, you know, And
Speaker 2: I'm trying to disentangle hurt from anger from fear. And
Speaker 2: you know, the reason we think this works so well
Speaker 2: is that that disentangling it's an intellectual exercise. So it
Speaker 2: takes us out of the limbic system and kind of
Speaker 2: into the forebrain. It distances us, as you said, dulls
Speaker 2: a little bit from the emotion. And I do find
Speaker 2: it effective. And I also again like this you know, painfully,
Speaker 2: hopelessly curious person. I just start to get really curious
Speaker 2: about that, and why did I feel that emotion and
Speaker 2: not that emotion? And why do I tend to feel
Speaker 2: that type of emotion and not that emotion when another
Speaker 2: person might feel differently. So I try to use it
Speaker 2: as a tool for curiosity and shifting into a slightly
Speaker 2: more intellectual mindset.
Speaker 1: And what I'll do I'll put a link to the
Speaker 1: feelings will in the show notes. It's quite an amazing,
Speaker 1: quite beautiful looking wheel that really at leasts I don't know,
Speaker 1: it must be like seventy or eighty emotional labels, and
Speaker 1: it helps when you're feeling a bit confused about exactly
Speaker 1: what you're feeling to help identify that. So I'll link
Speaker 1: to that in the show notes. Now, something that did
Speaker 1: surprise me that, but I guess when I thought about it,
Speaker 1: of course it makes sense. Is the impact of optimism
Speaker 1: on feeling resilient. I would love to know how do
Speaker 1: you foster optimism in yourself?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the research on it is so profound. It is
Speaker 2: something for those who are less familiar that people who
Speaker 2: are more optimistic live longer, people are more optimistic recover
Speaker 2: from cancer and cardiac disease more efficiently and effectively in
Speaker 2: our lower risk for cardiac disease. That it could be
Speaker 2: such a powerful signal of physical health made it even
Speaker 2: intellectually of interest to me. So that was how I
Speaker 2: first got to the conviction that I wanted to work
Speaker 2: on optimism, and then as I took it forward to
Speaker 2: bring the practice into my own life, I looked for
Speaker 2: windows where I had an optimistic thought that I then
Speaker 2: shut down, and I tried to notice when I was
Speaker 2: doing that and why. For me, what I discovered is
Speaker 2: it's not that I don't have the optimism. I'm just
Speaker 2: overwhelming the optimism with paranoia and negativity that was not
Speaker 2: serving me well, at least in certain key situations.
Speaker 1: We will be back with Gabriella soon. When we written,
Speaker 1: we'll be discussing what cognitive agilities and how you can
Speaker 1: develop it, as well as how to get better at prospection,
Speaker 1: which Gabriella believes is one of the most important leadership
Speaker 1: skills for the future. Looking for more tips to improve
Speaker 1: the way you work can live. I write a short
Speaker 1: weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped
Speaker 1: me personally you can sign up for that at Amantha
Speaker 1: dot com. That's Amantha dot com. I'd love to know
Speaker 1: about cognitive agility, which again I read that and I thought,
Speaker 1: really can you change that? So tell me about cognitive
Speaker 1: agility and what that means and what are some strategies
Speaker 1: you've used to improve that in yourself.
Speaker 2: So we talk about cognitive agility as the ability to
Speaker 2: go back and forth between the forest level view and
Speaker 2: the trees level of view. The forest level view is
Speaker 2: where we're scoping out opportunity and we're attuned to signals
Speaker 2: in the environment that are helping us figure out what
Speaker 2: to do. And then the trees level of view as
Speaker 2: we've decided what to do. Now we're executing in that
Speaker 2: plan and we're very heads down and focused, and we
Speaker 2: need to be able to do both of those things.
Speaker 2: But cognitive agility is about switching channels back and forth
Speaker 2: between the two. That is what we find to be
Speaker 2: this incredible differentiator in terms of resilience, because when we're
Speaker 2: in a tight spot, we need to be able to
Speaker 2: have focused effort to get out of that spot. But
Speaker 2: we can't get stuck in one approach, especially if it's
Speaker 2: not working or if the context around us is changing.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of interesting military research on this because
Speaker 2: you can imagine in modern warfare you have to be
Speaker 2: attuned to the signals around you have to change strategy
Speaker 2: is often, but you also have to be able to
Speaker 2: just grit and push and push and push in the
Speaker 2: trees level view of a given effort. So that's what
Speaker 2: that means and how it's connected to resilience. So I
Speaker 2: think that I am someone who if there are people
Speaker 2: who have a tendency to get stuck in the forest
Speaker 2: view and then their people get to have a tendency
Speaker 2: get stuck in the tree's view, I think, if anything,
Speaker 2: I'm someone who has a tendency to get stuck in
Speaker 2: the trees view. So I come to conviction about here's
Speaker 2: how we should do something, and then you know, I
Speaker 2: want to see it through. And one of the skills
Speaker 2: that I work on and that I help others work
Speaker 2: on as well, is when do you know you need
Speaker 2: to check yourself and come back up for air to
Speaker 2: look around. I do that, you know, with my teams,
Speaker 2: at least on a quarterly basis. But I think the
Speaker 2: other thing that really just naturally is a useful force
Speaker 2: function for me, given that tendency is a lot of
Speaker 2: the work I do is very cross functional, and it's
Speaker 2: more common than not that my cross functional peers will
Speaker 2: have ecosystem signals that they want me to pay attention
Speaker 2: to that might mean we need to change tack. And
Speaker 2: so as long as I'm keeping in close conversation with
Speaker 2: those peers who have their ears out, their sort of
Speaker 2: scouts in the environment for things I'm not seeing, I
Speaker 2: find it's a really helpful checkpoint for me to make
Speaker 2: sure I'm coming up to scan the forest, if nothing else,
Speaker 2: for the purpose of those conversations where we're kind of
Speaker 2: realigning our strategy.
Speaker 1: And so you mentioned that you'll meet with your team quarterly,
Speaker 1: and I guess it's distinct from doing an annual planning process.
Speaker 1: Does that mean that you're potentially making quite big changes
Speaker 1: every quarter as opposed to perhaps every year.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, new pieces come in, and we actually review
Speaker 2: our metrics monthly in a semi formal way, but they're
Speaker 2: sort of like a halfway through the court, let's see
Speaker 2: how we're doing against these top line metrics. And then
Speaker 2: in addition to that, there's again these signals that come in,
Speaker 2: whether it's a major change in the market, whether it's
Speaker 2: a new acquisition coming in that we need to absorb
Speaker 2: and figure out where to work that into the efforts
Speaker 2: and the resource allocation. So those things are always it
Speaker 2: always creates sort of fair game to reevaluate everything, and
Speaker 2: I say to my team maybe more often than I should.
Speaker 2: I'm still not sure the right frequency to voice this
Speaker 2: of like, good job, we got our road map set.
Speaker 2: Remember this is going to change, you know, because I'm
Speaker 2: trying to just say, like, we did a great thing,
Speaker 2: we did the work we're supposed to do, and be
Speaker 2: ready for this to change again. I'm actually trying to
Speaker 2: get ahead of that mattering crisis that we talked about
Speaker 2: and just to prepare that this is all. The change
Speaker 2: is a huge part of the work and the job
Speaker 2: to be done.
Speaker 1: I find that so interesting because as a LADA, people
Speaker 1: are looking to you for a clear direction and then
Speaker 1: if that changes, that can impact people's trust in you
Speaker 1: as a LADA. So how do you create that balance?
Speaker 2: Actually have a whole talk on this topic because I
Speaker 2: feel like prospection, which is why one of the topics
Speaker 2: in our book, our ability to see and plan for
Speaker 2: the future is an essential part of what builds people's
Speaker 2: cognitive trust in leaders today. So the sort of affective
Speaker 2: emotional side of trust is more about do we think
Speaker 2: our leaders benevolent? Are they kind? Do they take care
Speaker 2: of us? But the cognitive side is really we're judging
Speaker 2: someone's competence, and in this day and age where we
Speaker 2: feel so much uncertainty, we feel like we can't see
Speaker 2: what's ahead, we are looking to our leaders to be
Speaker 2: the person who can. And that doesn't mean we expect
Speaker 2: them to be fortune tellers, but we expect them to
Speaker 2: be spending a lot, a lot a lot of time
Speaker 2: thinking about the future, planning for scenarios, allocating resources today
Speaker 2: to set us up as best as possible against those
Speaker 2: future scenarios. We don't expect them to be superhumans, but
Speaker 2: we do expect them to put a lot of effort
Speaker 2: into that. And where I think leaders often fall short
Speaker 2: today in a way that does breach trust is with
Speaker 2: the statement, well, there's no way to know. We just
Speaker 2: can't know, So we'll tell you when we know what's
Speaker 2: going to happen, but we just don't know. What people
Speaker 2: need to hear is here's what we know, Here's what
Speaker 2: we don't know. Here's the scenarios that we foresee on
Speaker 2: the basis of that, here's the actions that we're taking right, detailed,
Speaker 2: fleshed out plans that reflect a lot of time and
Speaker 2: planning gives the reassurance even in an environment where everyone
Speaker 2: accepts that a lot of those plans will go by
Speaker 2: the wayside, that's still the job to be done. It's
Speaker 2: part of what we need to feel comfort that our
Speaker 2: leaders are taking on as the burden of leading us
Speaker 2: in this sort of foggy uncertainty.
Speaker 1: How can we build out prospection skills? Because there is
Speaker 1: something that you write about in the book, and there
Speaker 1: was one exercise that I did particularly like, But maybe
Speaker 1: I'll ask about that in the moment. I want to
Speaker 1: know what are you doing that's helping you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So perspection happens in two phases. The first phase
Speaker 2: is very fast and optimistic. We think really divergently. So
Speaker 2: if I said to you, think about where you might
Speaker 2: be in your career and ten years is right, it
Speaker 2: might be big and all kinds of grand things might
Speaker 2: come to mind. And then reality sets in. Here's where
Speaker 2: we sort of shut down. I find I shut down
Speaker 2: my own optimism. I get too pessimistic, realistic, and then
Speaker 2: over the course of much longer period of time, we
Speaker 2: now start planning. So our colleague, the psychologist Roy Baumeister,
Speaker 2: calls this dream big and get real, and each of
Speaker 2: us goes through those phases, whether we realize it or not.
Speaker 2: We need to be good at both of those things.
Speaker 2: When we study leaders who are really good at prospection,
Speaker 2: they actually spend a lot of time in the get
Speaker 2: real phase. In the planning phase, again, it's scenarios. It's
Speaker 2: what are all the ways this could play out? How
Speaker 2: are we going to allocate resources? When are we going
Speaker 2: to come back up to the forest level and reevaluate
Speaker 2: all of those things. There is such a thing as
Speaker 2: planning fatigue, just like there's decision fatigue. Getting better at
Speaker 2: prospection is expanding our capacity for planning. And when it
Speaker 2: all goes out the wind, we do more planning and
Speaker 2: then we guess what we wake up and we do
Speaker 2: still more planning. And so for me, it's really pushing
Speaker 2: myself to have more and more capacity for that. When
Speaker 2: it's not always the fun thing, it's not always the
Speaker 2: thing I want to do, it's not always something that
Speaker 2: feels gratifying, but I know that it's a huge part
Speaker 2: of my role, and if I'm not doing it, no
Speaker 2: one else is going to take the time to do
Speaker 2: that for my team.
Speaker 1: So I want to ask about the new doors opening
Speaker 1: exercise which he wrote about in Tomorrow Mind. And in
Speaker 1: this particular experiment, the researchers gave people some instructions and
Speaker 1: they were asked to do this once per week for
Speaker 1: a month, where the instructures read. After difficult experiences, many
Speaker 1: people feel a sense of loss. It feels that certain
Speaker 1: opportunities or doors have closed in their life. Sometimes people
Speaker 1: find that new doors open and new opportunities present themselves,
Speaker 1: and these new opportunities could be almost anything. The existence
Speaker 1: of new opportunities does not mean that losses are unimportant
Speaker 1: and less painful. Important losses can exist alongside some potentially
Speaker 1: important new opportunities. We would like to know if you've
Speaker 1: noticed any new doors opening in your own life in
Speaker 1: the past six months. For the next fifteen minutes, please
Speaker 1: write down whatever comes to mind about these new opportunities
Speaker 1: or new doors. So people did that once a week
Speaker 1: for a month, and it yielded some really impressive results.
Speaker 1: I'm curious to know your thoughts on that study, and
Speaker 1: maybe if that's an exercise that you have used yourself
Speaker 1: or with your teams or customers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a beautiful study illustrating the ways that we
Speaker 2: tell ourselves stories about what happened and why how it
Speaker 2: has such a profound influence on our psychological well being,
Speaker 2: our ability to recover, ability to move forward. That was
Speaker 2: really a study of post traumatic growth or what I
Speaker 2: called earlier anti fragility. So how can we go through
Speaker 2: something that is challenging and difficult, but within days, weeks, months,
Speaker 2: on the other end, we're actually more centered and more
Speaker 2: grounded and taking the time to think abou about what
Speaker 2: were the opportunities that were positive from my life that
Speaker 2: came in the aftermath of this hard, hard thing, and
Speaker 2: really reframe the way we think about going through those
Speaker 2: challenges to begin with. There's also a really lovely book
Speaker 2: called Redirect by Tim Wilson, a psychologist that talks about
Speaker 2: the broader project of how we can retell our own
Speaker 2: life stories in service of these different outcomes. And we're
Speaker 2: narrative creatures if we understand the mechanics of it. The
Speaker 2: way is that stories don't naturally form, We create them,
Speaker 2: whether we're intending to or not. We can then start
Speaker 2: to be much more intentional about how we tell ourselves
Speaker 2: the stories we do.
Speaker 1: How do you use that in your own life? When
Speaker 1: you can hear a story going on in your mind.
Speaker 2: I try not to tell myself a story until I'm ready,
Speaker 2: So I try to actually just notice, observe, pick up signals, learn,
Speaker 2: and the story I find does emerge through that process
Speaker 2: organically as I'm finding the right versus the wrong next step.
Speaker 2: But I think that one of the mistakes that I
Speaker 2: made when I was younger, and one of the mistakes
Speaker 2: I'm still learning not to make, is to come to
Speaker 2: that story too early, and to feel pushed to come
Speaker 2: to that story too early before I have discovered the
Speaker 2: wisdom to be gained from a situation.
Speaker 1: What great advice to end on, Gabriella. I have loved
Speaker 1: this chat. I find it such a joy when I
Speaker 1: read a book that I love, and I got to
Speaker 1: say Tomorrow Mind is one of the best books that
Speaker 1: I've read this year. I just loved it. And so
Speaker 1: it's been such a treat to have you on the
Speaker 1: show and to pick your brain about certain things. So
Speaker 1: thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for doing the work that you do and
Speaker 2: helping so many people, and your very kind words.
Speaker 1: I hope you loved this chat with Gabrielle as much
Speaker 1: as I did. I know most of us recognize the
Speaker 1: importance of praising those we lead, but maybe taking the
Speaker 1: next step of using effective praise to give others a
Speaker 1: sense of purpose and meaning could be what it takes
Speaker 1: to get things to the next level for you. If
Speaker 1: you want to learn more about Gabriella, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: her book Tomorrow Mind. It was so so good, and
Speaker 1: we'll put a link for that in our show notes.
Speaker 1: If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
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Speaker 1: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
Speaker 1: the Warrangery people, part of the cool And Nation.