You Should Be Taking More Risks. Here's How To Get Over Your Fear And Do It. | Sue Ashford

How to reduce perfectionism and boost confidence so you can be more effective in every area of your life. Susan (Sue) Ashford https://susanashford.com/ is an award-winning scholar and Professor at the University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Her passion for helping people to be maximally effective in their work lives has driven her teaching and research work on self-management, proactivity, change from below, and leadership and its development. This episode is part of our ongoing Sanely Ambitious https://www.danharris.com/t/sanely-ambitious series. In this episode we talk about: The concept of "flexing" The pernicious role of fear and anxiety The crucial difference between a performance mindset and a learning mindset Practical tools for changing your mindset What it means to unleash your inner scientist The importance of getting feedback (and why some people struggle asking for it) The concept of re-storying (reframing negative perspectives) Why we should  savor successes How to be interpersonally successful And much more Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Additional Resources: The Power of Flexing https://www.amazon.com/Power-Flexing-Experiments-Create-Life-Changing/dp/0063011573 Ari Weinzweig https://www.amazon.com/Lapsed-Anarchists-Approach-Zingermans-Leading/dp/0964895692 Reboot by Jerry Colonna https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Leadership-Art-Growing-Up-ebook/dp/B0796SNDSK Ego Free Leadership https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Free-Leadership-Unconscious-Business/dp/1626343799

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? In an era of rising perfectionism, so many of us are holding ourselves back from taking risks and running experiments because we're afraid of failing. My guest today says that's a huge mistake, and she's got a whole framework to help you change your mindset so you can get over yourself and get over the hump. Sue Ashford is a professor at the University of Michigan, Steven M. Ross School of Business, where she focuses on helping people to be maximally effective in their work lives. She's got a book called The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth. In this conversation, we talk about the concept of flexing, what it is exactly, the pernicious role of fear and anxiety, the crucial difference between a performance mindset and a learning

• 1:04Dan Harris?

  mindset, practical tools for changing your mindset, what it means to unleash your inner scientist, the importance of getting feedback and why some people struggle asking for it, the concept of restoring, reframing negative perspectives, why we should savor successes instead of letting them pass by and rushing to the next thing, how to be more interpersonally successful, and much more. Just to say, this is part of an occasional series we do here on the pod called "Sane Ambitious." We've got three new episodes we're dropping this week. Coming up on Wednesday, it's Wall Street lawyer-turned-popular podcaster Jordan Harbinger, who's going to talk about how to network without being gross, and many other success tips. And then coming up on Friday, it's another great podcaster, Jonathan Fields.

• 1:49Dan Harris?

  But today, it's Sue Ashford, and she's coming right up. Before we get started, I just want to make sure you know about all the cool stuff we've got going on over at danharris.com. That is my new-ish online community built with Substack, where paid subscribers can now listen to this podcast ad-free. Head over to podcast.danharris.com to set up ad-free listening today. If you're not a paid subscriber, you will be prompted to sign up when you go to podcast.danharris.com. Paid subscribers get lots of other stuff, including twice monthly live sessions on video with me where I guide a meditation and then take your questions. Plus, you get cheat sheets for every episode of this podcast, which include a summary of the key takeaways

• 2:31Dan Harris?

  and a full transcript. It's a lot of fun. You'll get to virtually meet lots of other folks who are interested in meditation. Community is a huge part of meditation that is often de-emphasized these days, but shouldn't be. Meditation and life in general is much more enjoyable in the carpool lane. Come on over to danharris.com and check it out.

• 2:53Speaker 01

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• 3:23Speaker 02

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• 3:57Dan Harris?

  Professor Sue Ashford, welcome to the show.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Thank you. Very happy to be here.

• 4:02Dan Harris?

  Happy to have you here. Let me start with a very obvious question. What is flexing?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  It's the most asked question about that book. And it doesn't mean the street version of flexing, which I didn't even know about till one of my colleagues told me with great glee, two months before it was came out. And the street version means like showing off, bragging, and it actually doesn't mean the physical version, which my husband did the entire time I was writing the book, flexing his muscles to see if I was working on the book. But it really means that we can approach our lives and our growth in a flexible way, a way that can be integrated into the lives we're living anyway, but also achieve growth

• 4:50Speaker 03

  to be the person we most want to be, to succeed in organizations, which is my area of study. And it just takes getting into being more flexible about it.

• 5:04Dan Harris?

  Just to put some meat on the bone here, so people can imagine this for themselves, can you give me an example or two of what a flex might look like?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's two different levels at which I think about this thing being flexible. One is it's a system of growing, a set of ideas, a set of practices about growing, that you can pick up when you most want to grow and then put down and don't be thinking about it when growth isn't on your mind. So I'll give an example from my personal life. I think these apply personally and professionally. I spent most of my career trying to help leaders to grow. It's only in writing this book that it got expanded to all people when my editor said, you know, Sue, leaders aren't the only people who want

• 5:53Speaker 03

  to be more personally and interpersonally effective. People want to be better parents, etc. So my example is from that world. So I have three daughters. I now have two son-in-laws. When they come for the holidays, they bring one baby, soon to be two babies. They bring a dog. They bring a cat. And one year, my friend from high school was also visiting at the same time. And they feel bad for me because they live far away. So lots of them stay for 15 days. Now 15 days is like 15 breakfasts, 15 dinners, at least a sheet change somewhere in

• 6:31Speaker 03

  there. It's a lot for me as a mom. And so using my own ideas for myself, a couple of years ago, I said, the way I need to grow is in being more patient. I really want my kids to come home, but it's also a lot of work. And so I picked up this set of ideas and started using them on myself during the holidays. Once they all left, patience isn't a big deal for me, but it is when all of that is happening. So it's flexible in that you can pick it up when something is really on your agenda, on your mind, some way in which you want to grow. And then you can put it down, once that feels a little

• 7:15Speaker 03

  more resolved. And then, the second way of flexing is, set of ideas around trying different things to achieve your goal, whatever your growth focus is. So mine was patience. And so I said, well, what can I do to be more patient when they're home? Now, from your podcast, I imagine you would start with meditation every morning, that kind of thing, to help with being present and being in the mindset of being patient. For me, I did taking more frequent breaks, enlisting help. I put a signup sheet up to have, get that help,

• 7:58Speaker 03

  that kind of thing. Tried to take some of the burden off me. I brought in more takeout. Tried not to hold such a high goal for myself of perfection. But I think we can grow by literally just being more experimental in our life, trying different things, seeing if they work and if they help. So that's what flexing means as well.

• 8:19Dan Harris?

  So there are little, or sometimes not so little, growth missions that we can launch in our professional or personal lives that are flexible in that they can be picked up or put down at a time of our choosing and maximal convenience, and that they can involve trying and experimenting with lots of ways to reach that goal.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Exactly. You summarized it well. If you're going to grow in something, you have to try new things to make improvement. And if you can be flexible, and the flexibility involves trying something new, being sensitive to or open to feedback about how it's landing. The skills I'm interested in helping people with tend to be interpersonal skills. So if you think you're a better listener, but nobody around you does, it's probably not going to work super well for people wanting to be seen as good listeners. It matters how other people view you. And so you're sensitive to the feedback, and then you're able to

• 9:24Speaker 03

  pivot. Okay, trying to act like I'm listening while I'm multitasking isn't really working. Now I've got to try something else to appear that way to others, that kind of thing.

• 9:36Dan Harris?

  This simple concept of launching these little growth missions, it raises a ton of questions about our ability to take and give feedback and our resistance to growth. There's lots of things to touch on, but let me just start with, especially in a work context. I've known many people who are super ambitious and always looking to grow, and I've known many people who are just kind of coasting. And I'm just curious, before we get into the growth of it all, why do people end up in these cul-de-sacs? You have a colleague who calls it "shut up and stay for peace and pay."

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:16Dan Harris?

  How do people get into these ruts, and how can we get out?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a super good question, and I love the cul-de-sac metaphor. Growth involves risk. It involves risk to your ego. I work with leaders trying to grow, and so one of the things leaders try to do is be more inspirational, and nothing involves more risk than that attempt, because we've seen it in the movies. We kind of know what inspirational looks like, and we're afraid we're going to do it in some really cheesy way that everyone's going to laugh at behind our back. And so it involves risk to your ego. It involves risk to your interpersonal relationships. You know, if you have a certain way of being with someone, like you're snarky and cynical, and then you don't want that

• 11:06Speaker 03

  for yourself anymore. You want to be more hopeful and see the good in the world. And as you try to change, it can make that relationship more tense or less close in ways that people don't want to risk. And so they kind of stay. Better to stay with what you know than to risk doing something that may not work.

• 11:29Dan Harris?

  So it's fear?

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. Fear, anxiety, you know, these things we all live with and live by.

• 11:36Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I get it. We'll talk about some ways to manage fear and anxiety, and also how to manage an inner phenomenon that you named earlier, which is perfectionism. But let me, let me ask you about something you say is crucial, which is having the right mindset as you're trying to grow and to be more effective interpersonally, personally, professionally, and in whatever way you're looking to improve. You talk about the difference between a performance mindset and a learning mindset. Can you hold forth on that?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. These are ideas from Carol Dweck. Carol Dweck is a very senior scholar at Stanford, and Carol is very unusual because she spent the bulk of her career basically on one idea for a lot of years. Most everybody moves around. We get a little bored. And her idea was that the way we think about ability really makes a difference. If we think our ability is fixed, we can't grow it. I can't grow to be more present in my current situations. I can't grow to be a better leader. I can't grow to be a better negotiator. If we think those things are fixed, we tend to fall into what's called a performance

• 12:53Speaker 03

  proved mindset. And in a performance proved mindset, your goal is to prove that you've got it. You've got what it takes, what you have is enough, and in fact, it's exceptional. But we're very wary about anything that might challenge that perception. So we don't like to take on challenges. We don't like to do new things. We like to stay with what we know. Again, the opposite of that is that if you think ability can be grown, you are more likely to take a learning mindset to your experiences. You still want to perform well. Everybody wants to perform well. That's a given. But it's kind of the way you go into it.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  A performance proved mindset is a very tense, structured, stiff, fearful mindset. And a learning mindset is a little looser. You feel a little more empowered because you know, whatever comes your way, you're going to grow and learn from it, get better over time. And this mindset has been shown to affect all sorts of things, including academic success, negotiation success, being willing to experiment with what it means to be a leader, all sorts of things. And I think it can help people to learn more from experiences. You will be more willing to experiment. You'll be more open to feedback.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  You'll set a learning focus in the first place, and I think that's essential.

• 14:24Dan Harris?

  We talked about anxiety earlier. In your book, you say that having a learning mindset or a growth mindset actually reduces anxiety. What's the mechanism there?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  The confidence that you can handle whatever might come.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  It's not like you're sure and it's not like you're not concerned about it. You are concerned, everyone's concerned about things that could go wrong, but you have more confidence that you can recover. A performance-proof mindset tends to be very brittle in the face of setbacks or challenges or failures.

• 15:01Dan Harris?

  But there is, I can imagine many people, especially people who don't look like me in the workplace, meaning they're not straight white men. And I'm not trying to be like super woke about this, but I'm trying to be sensitive to the fact that not everybody comes into the workplace with the same set of advantages.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 15:22Dan Harris?

  And if you have a growth mindset, that means you, I think definitionally, are going to be willing to quote unquote, "fail" sometimes in front of other people. I can imagine for some people, that's not an appetizing notion.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Hmm, yeah, for sure. Actually, the meta-analyses, those are studies of studies, have shown that a growth mindset is actually more useful for people who are more likely to face challenges like women in organizations, minorities in organizations would be examples of that. Because those challenges are going to come more often to them than they might for you, as our example of privilege. Neither group sets out to fail. They all want to try to achieve, but it's the fact that failures, setbacks, challenges do come and it's your ability to react to them. It's not like people with a growth mindset say,

• 16:21Speaker 03

  "Oh, what the heck, I'm going to wing it. Let's see how it goes. And if I fail, I'm going to learn from it." It's that they prepare really hard, they get ready, they are less anxious, in fact, because of their mindset. And they have some confidence that if a failure does happen, they will know how to handle it. And handling it includes storing their reaction to that failure to others, storing their ability to recover, their ability to learn over the long run to others. And the data are pretty clear that a performance-proof mindset is positively associated with performance, but it's not as positively associated with performance as a learning mindset is.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Learning mindset is more highly related to performance. And it's because those people actually feel more confident than people with a performance-proof mindset. A performance-proof mindset, you're worried that what you've got isn't enough. And because you believe it can't be grown, it creates some anxiety and actually reduces your confidence. So it's kind of an ironic twist.

• 17:34Dan Harris?

  So if I'm hearing you correctly, for those of us who might approach the adoption of a growth mindset with some trepidation, we don't feel comfortable learning in front of other people, which is a fancy way of saying failing or making mistakes in front of other people. What you're saying is it's a bit of a leap of faith, but the data are pretty clear that actually you're more likely to succeed if you go this route.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, on average. But the problem with giving advice to practical people is they care somewhat of the on-average result, but they really care about what's going to happen to them. You know, it's like telling people, "On average, it's okay to negotiate your job offer." But everyone's just worried about that one case themselves and what might happen if they do and it goes south. I prefer to think of this not as you are one or you are the other, but you likely have places and times where you can be triggered into a performance-proof mindset in a way that isn't helping you and that you can move yourself from one to the other.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  To continue with the example of my now enlarged family, when I met my second son-in-law, I asked him, "So what's your mom like?" And he said, "My mom is a living saint." And I thought, "Oh, Hannah, that's my daughter. I thought, 'You're in trouble. That's who he's going to be comparing you to, a living saint.'" Well, it turns out he has no trouble with Hannah. Hannah is somewhat messy and he just kind of cleans up behind her and it's fine. The person that comment redounded to was me. So every time he visited, I thought, I have to be a living saint. That's a performance-proof mindset.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  I have to prove to him that this saintliness, this small capacity for saintliness that I have, is enough. It's really as good, and it's as good as his mom's. One day, one weekend, they came up for a Michigan football game and I was perfect for two and a half days. Unfortunately, they stayed for three. And I lost it in the kitchen. And so I went out and I was talking to him and I said, hey, Matt, this comment you said about your mom, it's really causing me problems. I feel like I have to be perfect. And he said, oh, no. He goes, that's just my way of saying I love my mom. Then he said, I'm sure your kids would describe you the same.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And my two daughters, who were sitting right there, burst out laughing. So I can't make it on saintliness. It just doesn't happen. But I can notice that I'm trying to be perfect. I'm trying to be saintly in order to be okay with this person and I can pull myself into the other mindset. And Carol Dweck has the best way of doing that. She likes the word "yet." So I'm not the perfect hostess, yet. I'm not a great negotiator, yet. I usually, in workshops, ask people, what questions could you ask yourself about that thing that didn't go well that will put you more in a growth mindset?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  One of them is, what possibilities were there that I wasn't seeing?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Like that makes you sort of more open. And this whole approach is really designed to be empowering of people. I'm a big believer in the power of everyone who wants to grow, to grow. You know, in organizations, in the leadership area, we tend to invest in the top 10 to 15%. And we don't pay any attention to the rest of them as far as growing their leadership. I think there can be more leadership from more places and people can be empowered to go after it. But you've got to work it a little bit. There is some investment needed.

• 21:26Dan Harris?

  So what we're talking about now, I think, is how do we change our mindset? I take seriously what you said before, that it's not all one or all the other. Many of us are probably just switching back and forth between fixed mindset and a growth mindset all the time. But there's a solid reason to want to move more consistently into a growth mindset. And you have at least two recommendations in the book. One is changing mental chatter, which I think is what we're talking about now. And the other is self-compassion. Well, I'll get to self-compassion in a second because it's one of my favorite concepts. But is there anything more to say about how we can rewire or counterprogram against

• 22:06Dan Harris?

  our inner dialogue in a way that will make us more likely to be in a growth mindset?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. One is to become aware of your inner chatter. I, in the example I gave you, if my son-in-law wasn't aware that I took it all on, that I was trying to prove what my saintliness was good, until I sort of had that breakdown where I just couldn't do it anymore. And then it was like, okay, well, why is it so important to do it at that level perfection in this place? What is it I can learn? And my self-insight was...

• 22:44Speaker 03

  You know, it made no sense for me to be competing to show how great I was. This was going to be a person who's in my life and it made more sense to communicate with him and talk to him about it. I think the first step is being aware of where you are, what your head is telling you you need to do, and being aware of the costs that it's inflicting on you. So if you think, I have to be perfect in this presentation that I'm doing after the winter holidays, the cost is you don't spend any time present with your family. You spend most of your time in anxiety about getting this thing done.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  And a lot of it you could realize later was not productive time spent on actually thinking about the audience, thinking about what they need to hear, thinking about how you could best doing your message, meditating to clear your head, going on a walk to just percolate ideas. It's rather spent on fear. I gotta be great, I gotta be great, I gotta be great, I gotta be great. So self-awareness is the key, seeing what you're doing. And then it's, I think, really asking yourself questions to kind of move the needle a little bit. The other strategy for me that's super useful is thinking about what is my ultimate objective, my real goal.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  And as soon as I get the real goal off of me and on to them, I feel better, I feel more empowered, I feel more creative, and I'm more in a learning mindset about how I put together a great talk here. And once I think, what do I want them to walk away with? Why do I care about this audience so much? And often they're people I'm trying to teach, that I want to walk away with a message. I even do it in my research and writing. I have for myself the noble goal of why I'm doing what I'm doing. And the noble goal inspires me then to be braver and also be cognizant of what's going on in my head and want to overcome it. Does that make sense?

• 24:53Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it reminds me of one of my little... Wise ass slogans, which is that the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. I think when you start focusing on why you want to do it for other people and you're less stuck in a kind of solipsistic, self-centered mode, you're more effective, you're more happy.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Just to finish that off, it's also a key transition for leaders that's been noted by all sorts of people who've gone on to be great leaders, is that I had to shift from it's all about me to it's all about them.

• 25:29Dan Harris?

  Well, back to the me for a second. You also referenced self-compassion as being important in terms of switching from a fixed or a performance mindset to a growth or a learning mindset.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, this came from a study I did with a couple of other authors. And I kind of felt like when I was asked to come on your podcast that we should call it East Meets West. You are very invested in meditation and compassion meditation, et cetera. I don't do any of that. For me, the most meditative I get is to not read a book while I'm blow drying, you know, like just do one thing. But I'm attracted, obviously, that's why I'm a regular listener of your podcast. I'm attracted to the ideals. So I got pulled into this study on self-compassion and it was a day by day study. We asked leaders to reflect

• 26:25Speaker 03

  on their challenges or reflect on their challenges with compassion for themselves. And what we found was a big difference in how much they could endorse the identity of leader for themselves. You could see that if you have a lot of challenges and you sort of say, well, I'm not really that much of a leader, then you don't have to do leader-like things, which in face of challenges is pretty risky. So when they reflected on their challenges with self-compassion,

• 27:00Speaker 03

  They endorsed the identity of leader and then they went on to do more leadership than those who reflected on their challenges. They were less likely to say, yeah, leader is a word that describes me. And then they were less likely to do leader activities later in the day. And so it made me really a believer of the way that we approach ourselves can really make a difference. And if we are berating ourselves every time we're not at perfection, we probably will stay in a performance-proof mindset because it's painful to self-berate and to experience that. But if we are compassionate, not compassionate to this level, because I know that's where

• 27:45Speaker 03

  you're going next, where we can just screw up all over the place. But when we do screw up, saying, yeah, that didn't go well. Sometimes these things are challenging and we don't meet it the way we want. How could we do it better? You know, then you've got to go into the questioning for the future. But I do think that compassion helps us to stay more in a learning mindset.

• 28:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah, a lot of people worry that if they're self-compassionate, they're going to be in a bubble bath or eating ice cream for the rest of their lives. They're mistaking complacency for compassion, but they're different things. A self-compassionate approach is not about letting yourself off the hook. It's about talking to yourself the way a good coach would talk to you. You can acknowledge errors. You're just not a jerk about it. And that's, I think that that's key. And it leads inexorably to a growth mindset because you're more willing to take risks and run experiments, et cetera, et cetera.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:42Dan Harris?

  Speaking of running experiments, let's get back to some of the nitty-gritty of flexing. How do I pick what I'm going to flex on? What's my, you list lots of... Areas for flexing interpersonal relationships at work or at home, being more assertive, presentation skills, there are lots of flexes we can run. How do I pick the goal for me?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, we interviewed over 70 people for the book and the triggers came down to two buckets. One bucket, we called pain of the present. There's something in my present that's causing pain to me, or that I can see I'm causing pain to others. So, pain to me might be, I'm exhausted, I'm burned out, I'm literally in pain, or my feelings are hurt all the time, I'm angry all the time, that's my pain, or I can see I'm causing pain to others. One of the examples in the book was a woman who, her issue turned out to be that

• 29:49Speaker 03

  she expressed her emotions very strongly. And what she noticed is, when she expressed her emotions, even positive emotions, it kind of killed the room, right? It was like, she was so positive that nobody else could be positive because they couldn't match her level, and so they just kind of stopped. And when she was negative, the room just stopped. So, she could tell she was causing pain to the group, to the team, to the discussion. And that is a big motivator for people to want to grow, that there's something painful going on in the present. And that creates kind of avoidance motivation. I want to avoid that pain, so I'm going to try to change. And then the other motivation is kind of

• 30:34Speaker 03

  a, more of an approach motivation. I called it fantasies of the future in the book. So, it's like, you have a fantasy of future Dan, I have fantasies of future Sue, and how she's going to be, and how she's going to be like. And current Sue may struggle, but I have this image that I'm moving towards. People that I talked to who were in organizations, they often got it through role models. They saw a CEO, they wanted to be like that CEO. In the personal life, it's often same, role models, like, I really want to be like my mom was in my personal life. And so, when you see you're not like that, it generates a motivation to be more like that.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  So those were the two triggers. And the idea that makes this workable, because I teach a lot of very busy people, people that don't have time for some new program in their lives. But the idea that makes this workable is that you don't have to add something to your life in order to use these ideas. You just have to use the experiences you're having anyway. You know, my kids are coming home for the holiday. I can use that experience to work on my patients. You're giving presentations anyway. You could use that to work on that. And the idea is that in any experience, there can be a lot going on.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  But the goal of setting a learning focus is just to add one second thread to the experience. One thread is the thing you're doing, the content, putting on dinners, breakfast for that at-home situation, or doing the presentation. And then the second thread is you. What could you learn about you? What could you work on about you in this situation in order to improve? So the reason why this works with very busy people is it sort of takes what they're doing anyway, and it says, all you got to do is bring some awareness of you in that setting to your, you know, as you go through it, seek some feedback, et cetera. So it's like very small things to do.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  But that's how you get the focus is pain or this vision you have.

• 32:54Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so you, if you're thinking about areas where you can flex, this heuristic you're giving us is, are there things in your life that are causing you a lot of physical or psychological pain? Or do you have somebody who you'd like to emulate? Or some version of yourself you'd like to reach? And can you whittle it down to one doable, hopefully enjoyable goal? That doesn't require reshuffling your whole calendar. It's just about using the things on your calendar to see if you can get further toward that goal for some period of time?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Exactly right, yes. And people find that idea very empowering. It's like, oh, I can do that. I'm going to be doing this thing anyway. I can also work on my... Whatever, listening, being more influential, being more approachable in that situation than I'm going to be in anyway. So it's just bringing that second focus to the situation.

• 33:59Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Sue talks about what it means to unleash your inner scientist, the importance of getting feedback, and why some people really struggle asking for it, and managing your emotions.

• 34:10Speaker 04

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• 34:42Dan Harris?

  In your book, you have a whole section called unleashing your inner scientist, planning and conducting experiments. Say more about what you mean by unleashing the inner scientist.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Well, I mean it pretty casually, though people have taken it more seriously, you know, like the words, the actual words, meaning exactly what they say. I mean it, just do some experiments. Try something new. Try some things. So you want to be a better listener? Think of two or three things you could do. There was one guy I talk about in the book who has the pseudonym Simon, and he wanted to become more approachable. People were calling him formidable behind his back. And he's like, "I work in a very humanistic company, and being formidable, this is not going to be good for me, and it's not how I want to be." And so he wanted to work on becoming more approachable. He was running a big task

• 35:36Speaker 03

  force that was coming up, and he said, "Okay, I could work on it there." So he did three things. He said, "I'm going to get to the meetings on time," as opposed to my usual stance, which is to come in late with bundles of work, pass out the work, and jump into it. "I'm going to get there early. I'm going to greet everyone when they come." That seems like a good experiment to becoming more approachable. He just said, I'm gonna sit on the side of the table, not at the end. The end is the power position. I'm gonna sit on the side so that the more junior people on the task force feel like they can talk to me. And then he said, the third one was the most important one, but the simplest. He said, I'm just, I'm gonna smile more. I'm gonna work on smiling more.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  He said, my resting face, and I always tell my audiences, not as bad as the one that just went through your head. The resting face, we all joke about, but he said it was just a somber, serious resting face. He said, I was thinking about them, I was thinking warm thoughts, but nobody could tell. So I smiled more. The idea of experiments is trying something. The people who take it more seriously sort of try something for two weeks, then they try something else, and they see which had better results. I think it's much more casual than that. Just try something new and be observant about what happens.

• 36:56Dan Harris?

  I smiled during that story because I have been told many times that I have a resting face that is imposing. So as we're running these experiments, it's very important, you say, to get feedback. And I think it's important writ large in life to get feedback.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 37:17Dan Harris?

  So let's talk about it. I have a million questions. Many people find it's hard to get feedback. In fact, the woman who's producing this episode, Eleanor Vassili, has said to me that she finds it hard to get feedback from me because I'm so damn busy all the time. So why is it so hard to get feedback often?

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Well, if you can't find the person you need to give it to you, that's a problem for sure. We get in our own way, the ego rears its ugly head again. Like, we want feedback, but do we really? We really just want positives, but no, we really want negative. You know, but our ego worries about the kind of feedback we might get. So some people don't ask because they're afraid of what the message might. Say, a young woman I interviewed for the book said, "When I knew I was doing bad, then I definitely would never ask for feedback because I don't want my boss to hear herself saying it because it'll solidify it in her mind. So I don't ask for feedback," you know,

• 38:20Speaker 03

  which of course is crazy. We also worry about our image, how we look, just because of the fact that we want feedback. Do we look insecure? Do we look unconfident? So those are a couple of things. And then we also worry a little bit about, if I get feedback and then I don't change, will things go worse for me? What if I hear about something that I can't fix? I wrote my dissertation on feedback seeking. So I've been studying this for a long time. And so we do get in our own way. What we found, though, in a major study where we asked leaders about feedback seeking, then we asked their subordinates,

• 39:04Speaker 03

  their peers, and their boss. And what we found was that people feared seeking feedback would make them look unconfident, insecure, but actually it made a positive impression on everyone, subordinates, peers, and the boss. People saw it more as a sign that you cared, not that you're insecure, but you care about what we're trying to achieve enough to ask for feedback.

• 39:30Dan Harris?

  Yes. And to Eleanor, who's listening, that was the impression I got when you asked me. So how does Eleanor and how do the rest of us get feedback when often it may feel like people are too busy to give it, or we're too scared to ask?

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, what we tend to do when we're too scared to ask, though I've never gotten the data to show this completely, but this is what makes sense to me. When we're too scared to ask, we use the other strategy of getting feedback, which is we monitor the subtle cues. So Eleanor might look at how you look at her. Eleanor might look at whether you talk to her, or you talk to someone else in the room for advice on how to make the show go great. She might be interpreting Things that are happening as feedback for her. And you know, this is problematic as a strategy, right? Because we can get it wrong dramatically.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  So particularly if we have a preconception of how we're doing. Like if we think we did really poorly. Like if I think I did really poorly in a class or I'm doing really poorly. I'm become very attuned to facial expressions that suggest they're bored. They're turned off, they're not agreeing, they think I'm stupid, that kind of thing. I have come to believe that I can no longer tell the difference between a student who is enthralled and a student who's bored. They kind of look the same to me, so I don't know. So it's, it's not a great way to get feedback, but it's one we can fall back on when we're afraid to ask. And it's also true that just asking isn't a guarantee.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  There's a great meme that I put up when students are talking about this and it shows a picture of a very disgusted looking cat. And it says, "You need to tell me what I want to hear." On the top of the cat, you know, and so a lot of times people, particularly across the hierarchical divide, so leaders wanting to get feedback. Everybody else is just trying to tell them what they want to hear. And so it's like an echo chamber, they don't get feedback. You know, I'm around more and more retired people now and retired businessmen kind of crack me up. They say, "Sue, no one ever laughs at my jokes anymore." And I'm like, "Well, do you, what do you think?"

• 41:55Speaker 03

  You know, perhaps the laughter was always just the hierarchy. So both methods have their difficulties. There isn't a magic bullet, but there are some ways to get feedback. Simon, in that task force, there was a consultant to the task force. So he told the consultant what he wanted, what, that he was working on, making sure that everyone was comfortable approaching him. And so after the meetings, he would ask her, "How do you think I did?" You know, "I'm working on X, how do, how am I doing?" I think is a great way to phrase it. So instead of saying, "Hey boss, do you have feedback for me?" You could say, "I'm working on being more approachable. How do you think I'm doing? I'm working on my listening."

• 42:40Speaker 03

  You know, like if you make it more tailored, I think you get better feedback. And so you could think about, that's a how you ask. You can also think about who you ask. But yeah, tying down really busy people is a problem. I always like the, "Hey, boss, we need to meet" approach.

• 42:59Dan Harris?

  Yeah, but if somebody says that to me, I think I'm in trouble or they're gonna file an HR complaint or...

• 43:03Speaker 03

  I know. I hate that. I hate that. I hate the idea that you don't run into people these days, right? Anymore. No one's in, in the office. Everyone's doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And so you want to have a meeting with a person to talk about something that's going on, but you don't want to put it in the email because then it's poor communic... You know, there's so much message that gets locked. So you say, "Hey, could we meet?" And then they get anxious about, "What are we meeting about? Why do you want to meet with me?" And I don't know the solution to that problem yet.

• 43:40Dan Harris?

  I have a suggestion.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 43:42Dan Harris?

  Now, I'm sure I'm gonna get in this email from Eleanor later today. "Do you have 10 minutes? I need some advice."

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's a great suggestion. It fits with a new set of studies coming out of Columbia, where they compared advice-seeking and feedback-seeking. And what they found was that when you say, "I need some feedback from you" versus "I need some advice from you," leaders... I think it was leaders, could've just been people peer-to-peer, but they got better, more usable information when they asked for advice rather than feedback. So that strategy fits with some recent research, too.

• 44:28Dan Harris?

  I love it. My intuitions are sometimes right.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Makes an academic happy.

• 44:33Dan Harris?

  Exactly. What is the feedback fallacy?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  It's just that idea that if I ask for feedback, I'll look weak.

• 44:43Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  And it's a fallacy because, you know, it's just been shown not to be true. It actually makes you look like you care.

• 44:51Dan Harris?

  Got it. Another thing you write about when it comes to feedback is the importance of getting it from diverse sources. Can you say a little bit more about that?

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, our egos are very powerful things. So if someone tends to tell us we're doing pretty well, we're re enforced to go back to that person and get that message again and again. And these days, as society gets more diverse, as organizations get more diverse, you need to know how things are landing with diverse folks. So if you always go to people who look like you, you're going to get feedback that could be super useful and maybe necessarily wouldn't all be positive, but it might not capture what the impressions people have who don't look like you, come from a very different background from you. It's always valuable just from an information averaging standpoint,

• 45:45Speaker 03

  but I think it's never been more valuable than it is today and will be in the future as organizations get more diverse.

• 45:53Dan Harris?

  So we're talking about, just to level set here, we're talking about flexing, which is these little growth missions that you can run in your personal or private life. They're flexible because you can do it when, where, and how you want. And also they're flexible because you can use lots of different tools and test them and see what works. And one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of minutes is once you pick your mission, you want to get some feedback on how you're doing. The other thing you recommend in terms of monitoring these experiments and measuring them as well is the importance of reflection. What do you mean by that?

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of people, from poets to philosophers, who believe that, you know, you don't learn from experience, you learn from your reflection on experience. That experiences are just like happenings. They're not really experiences until we've sort of given them some thought and synthesized. What happened in that experience? What part did I play? How do I feel about that? Was it all functional? Was some of it dysfunctional? You know, what was I triggered by and reacting to? And so you need to spend a little bit of time

• 47:16Speaker 03

  thinking about that, in whatever way you can find that time. And this is the part, when I'm teaching very busy people, that I feel a little dishonest when I say, "Look, this stuff is easy. You can just incorporate it into your life." Because the hardest thing busy people feel comfortable taking time to do is pausing, stopping, and reflecting. You know, they're pretty addicted to being busy, continuing to be busy. So they sort of say, "Wait, Sue. You said this was going to be easy. This no longer is starting to sound easy."

• 47:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I was laughing as you were saying that because I'm a busy person and I love coming up with new ideas and talking about those and imagining them. I don't love the details associated with those new ideas and I don't love the process of pausing and thinking about whether the old ideas have worked and what can I learn from them. Having said that, I see the value. How can we do this in the most effective and efficient manner? How can we reflect?

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Spoken like a busy person. Let's get it efficient. Well, it sort of depends on the kind of reflection we're talking about. If we're talking about you're leading a team and the team goes out and does something...

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Take some time when you come back to sort of have a few structured questions you ask about what just happened. What went well, what didn't go well, where do we need to improve, what do we want to continue, you know, like five questions that you ask, just get the team talking about it is good for the team's growth. If it's you and an interpersonal situation goes really off the rails and you, you really don't understand why it went off the rails, you know, getting someone to help with that, a coach, et cetera, having someone

• 49:14Speaker 03

  help you to see where you're adding meanings and where something really truly happened. So the question, what would a video recorder pick up about that experience I just had that I'm now thinking about? And what are meanings meanings that I'm adding in? But that takes a little more time and quiet and inefficiency. I'm sorry. Because you're going to run up against dead ends, you're going to have questions you don't have answers to, and some of that is hard. So that's where having, having someone to help. And then in between,

• 49:54Speaker 03

  there's just like daily reflection practices. So there's a CEO in Ann Arbor of a little company called Zingerman's. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's a, it's a small deli that's become world famous. He and his partner have started a whole community of businesses. They decided not to make a Zingerman's in every city like Starbucks, but rather to have make businesses in Ann Arbor that are all successful. They have a creamery, they have a coffee house, they have a roadhouse, they have an event space, and all of it is just done really, really well. It's so he's a fabulous executive. He also writes books.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  He'd be a wonderful person to have on your show. And his name is Ari Winesweg, and he writes in a journal every day for 20 minutes when he gets up. He says, "Some people exercise for their body. This is an exercise for my mind." And so he isn't reflecting on a particular incident, but he's rather just reflecting on what goes on in his life. Another person whose practice I know about is Marshall Goldsmith, who's a pretty famous executive coach. He's also the most extraordinarily extroverted man I've ever met. And Marshall has a friend call him five nights a week

• 51:20Speaker 03

  and ask him four questions that Marshall has given the friend to ask him. And then he asks the friend four questions the friend has given Marshall to ask him. By answering the questions to each other, they're reflecting on their lives and days. You know, I have other people who just have a little notebook they keep in their travel bag. They only reflect on airplanes. One young CEO said, "You know, I tend to reflect in the shower in the morning." He said, "You know, it's really actually very helpful for me. I just have to remember not to say to someone, 'I was thinking about you in the shower.'" Because that doesn't go well.

• 51:56Dan Harris?

  No, it doesn't. Another thing you spend a lot of time on in the book, in the context of, again, running these experiments and flexing, is the importance of managing your emotions. Why is that important in this context?

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Why is it important to manage our emotions? Well, our emotions get in the way of our learning about ourselves, our self-understanding. If I'm defensive, I'm not hearing the message. So if you give me feedback and I'm defensive about it, I don't ever hear the feedback. And the goal is to get it so you recognize what you're doing, that you're feeling an emotion, defensiveness, in the moment. It used to be I'd recognize it about eight hours later. It would do me no good. But usually when I feel that triggered need to respond in a certain way, it's usually driven by emotion, embarrassment, shame.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  And I feel like if I could just explain it to you, you wouldn't have the feeling you have. That's the defensiveness. And so if I can control the emotion, the anxiety, the shame, the embarrassment, then I can hear your message and I can learn from it. If I can control my anxiety in the first place, I'm brave enough to try and experiment. And I hope you see how self-understanding is really critical throughout this whole process, figuring out what emotions I tend to feel when I'm not at my best self, and what emotions and what they are, and then what I can do about them.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  So if certain people tend to really bring you down, there's things you can do about them. When I was in my dean role, there was this one guy, oh my gosh, he was hard to listen to, and we had bi-weekly meetings. It would ruin my week. I finally had to say to my assistant, just don't put him on a Monday or a Friday. I can handle him on the other days, but it was bad. So that's a way to manage emotions. So the academic literature, this is a little bit where east meets west. The academic literature is full of motion regulation strategies that we could talk about.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  The east part, the meditation so that you could be present in a situation, is a different set of strategies that would also work. But it's just something so that your emotions aren't running you, but you're either in control of them or recognize them and recognize their impact. But you're more in control. I think matters for all stages, whether you'll set a learning focus in the first place, your ability to hold a growth mindset, your ability to listen to feedback. While you're reflecting, the ability to reflect fully versus narrowly. Emotions matter for all of that.

• 54:53Dan Harris?

  Agreed. Coming up, Sue talks about the concept of restoring, why we should savor successes, how to be more interpersonally successful, and more.

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• 55:39Dan Harris?

  Under this aegis of emotions, there are two concepts you introduce in the book. One is a concept you mentioned earlier, but I didn't follow up on, which is restorying, and the other is savoring.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:52Dan Harris?

  Can you talk about these?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Yes, love to. So, restorying is what is the story you say in your head that in part is causing the emotions? So, let's say you're in a meeting, and you're a woman, and there's a guy. You're presenting, and he starts firing questions at you. Now, in your head, you could say, "What a jerk." You know, like, "He's just out to get me, to make me look bad in front of the boss." When you story it that way, you're getting anxious, you're probably answering more force, or more inappropriate force, or something. If you restoried it to say, "It's super cool that he's that interested in my topic. This is great.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  Like, we're co-creating this idea." I don't know which is true. The first one may be true, but the story you're telling yourself about it isn't helping you to perform well. And so, restorying is just telling yourself a different story about it in the light of the fact that you don't know where truth lies. After a while, if you do know where truth lies, you're not going to restore it. But when it hits you by surprise, you could always restore it. I had a boss who didn't talk to his subordinates, didn't tell them, "Good job." He said, "Why should I tell them they're doing a good job? It's their job. I'll thank them if they do something extraordinary." And it drove the associate deans nuts.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  I came back into the dean's office, and I chose to story it as, "He totally trusts me to do my area." And so, because of that, he has no need to talk to me about it. And I was fine. They were not fine. And I don't know where truth lies. I don't know if he totally trusts me and didn't trust. I don't know anything. But I just know we make it up in our heads in ways that don't help us.

• 57:47Dan Harris?

  And savoring?

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Oh, savoring. Yeah, savoring is, came from a set of ideas in positive psychology. I have some colleagues who are very steeped in positive approaches to organizations and organization life. And one friend in particular is always saying, Sue, you forgot the positive. There could be positive emotions that help your learning, not just negative emotions that detract from your learning. She was, of course, right. And so I started looking at the research on savoring and the research on awe. And the research is pretty clear that if you take time to savor successes, savor things that went well, as well as

• 58:30Speaker 03

  look at things that didn't go well, you feel more empowered, you feel more hopeful about the future, you feel more self-confident. Like, why wouldn't we do this? Why do we not do it? We often don't. We often overlook anything that went well and just laser focus on what didn't go so well.

• 58:51Dan Harris?

  This might be a good time to talk about remembering your experiments, because you mentioned earlier, this is a thing you wanted to talk about. I'm wondering if it relates in some way to savoring?

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could. It's more that our experiences are chaotic. There's a lot going on. There's a lot we're trying to do. There's a lot of people we're trying to interpret and please. And so remembering to do your experiments can be tough, right? I always tell people, come up with just two, or three, if one is as easy as smiling. Yeah, I was teaching this set of ideas to an amazing organization down in Texas that's called the Holdsworth Center, and they're oriented towards helping grow the quality of schools in Texas by investing in leaders and trying to grow their leadership ranks, principals,

• 59:45Speaker 03

  superintendents, et cetera. And so I've gone down and taught with them because our ideas about leadership were totally aligned. And this one superintendent told me the story of how he remembered one of his experiments. He said he had a new board member and she was very hard for him to listen to. Something about the way she talked made him defensive. And then the conversation would just kind of get more and more amped up. And so he said, you know, I really just have to listen more with this person. And this is another great example of flexing. He's adopting a goal with just one single person with whom he's having trouble.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Right? He's not trying to listen everywhere, but just with this one person where it was not going well. And so he said, that's his goal. And so his experiment was to listen with more openness. And he said, he had trouble remembering it. So what he did is he went into the contacts function of his cellular phone. And he went to her name and he changed her name. And he changed it to the word, listen exclamation point. Every time she called, he knew what he was supposed to do. And he said, it was great. And then after a couple of months, they got on a really good footing. And he changed it back to her name and went on with his life.

• 1:01:06Dan Harris?

  Along these lines, in terms of remembering, because I, I often say that remembering or not forgetting is the hardest part of personal growth. You know, I talk about this all the time. You can listen to a great podcast, read a good book, decide to launch a flex. And then you just forget because life, you know, carries you along on, on its tides. So another thing you talk about in the book in this regard is implementation intentions. I have some familiarity with these, having interviewed a lot of experts in the area of behavior change. But maybe you could describe what implementation intentions are and how they'd be relevant to this discussion?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, happy to. And you may, you may know more than I do on this. This is a set of research ideas that say, if you set intentions around the things you're hoping to achieve, you're much more likely to achieve them. So it's not just, I want to be physically fit. And it's not even just, I'm going to go work out on Sunday. It's when my alarm goes off in my phone, I'm going to stand up and go.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  You set an intention like that and you're much more likely to do it. And it's a little bit like, I'm gonna have my shoes out in the morning on Sundays when I work out. You're much more likely. You know, it's just ways of getting more specific about your commitment that makes people follow up their goals more often.

• 1:02:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I've also heard implementation intentions discussed in an if-then framework because it's so hard to remember to do a thing, to boot up an exercise habit and actually make it an abiding one, or to remember your flex goal with the X person is to listen better so that they don't trigger you as much. You can have implementation intentions that say, if I forget to do it twice in a row, I will remember by tying a string around my hand, or whatever it is. Something very specific that helps you kind of plan for resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, love that. Yeah. And note, if you have a growth mindset, you're much more likely to do that.

• 1:03:21Dan Harris?

  Exactly.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Because you recognize that you're probably gonna screw up in some way.

• 1:03:24Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Dan Harris?

  In our remaining time, I wanted to talk a little bit about, if you're game, you taught a whole course on interpersonal behavior. And I'm fascinated with this subject. Loyal listeners are probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but I just love the fact, or I'm fascinated by the fact that we are intensely social animals. It is the reason why we got to the top of the food chain, for better or worse. And yet, we are so rarely taught how to interact socially with other people. And so the fact that you taught a whole course on it is interesting to me. And I'd love to hear, just like, what specific skills were you teaching? And how hard was it to teach people who, I'm assuming, like most of us, you know, this was their first time learning how to

• 1:04:11Dan Harris?

  implement basic interpersonal hygiene?

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and they're high-powered MBAs at a top MBA program in the country. Right. Right, so they're the top of the top of the food chain in their minds, right? So they elected into it and, oh, all sorts of topics. There was a book, it's no longer in print, called Interpersonal Behavior, written by two Harvard professors, a textbook, and I drew a lot from that. I loved this course and this topic because it went deeper with these students. Yes, there were some skills and strategies we taught, but it went deeper in the sense of saying, "Part of the joy of life is figuring out what you most want, really, your noble goals,

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  and figuring out how you help and get in the way of meeting them, figuring out how you want to be with others, and then figuring out how you contribute to that or detract from that." So it was a lot of that kind of more, you might call it soul-searching. One framework from the textbook I love was very simple. It was assumptions, perceptions, feelings. So APF, assumptions, perceptions, feelings. That our assumptions drive our perceptions. If I assume that boss thinks I'm doing a bad job, I perceive his lack of talking to me as evidence of that, and then I feel bad. So that's just a little roundabout. But also, when we're having feelings, that is a good signal

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  that we maybe need to think about what assumptions we're bringing to the situation and how we're perceiving things, so that restoring could happen there. Students really liked that framework. And we analyzed, in the book, they have this woman who did an interview, and the woman was like from the early 60s. So seemed tragically old-fashioned to them. And they always complained about, "Why are we studying older people? Like, people that don't have anything to do with..." This was the 80s, it wasn't like it was now. But, "Why are we studying people that are not us?" And I said, "Well, that's the whole point. It's a lot easier to understand people who are you, but people who are not you, that's where you need to think about what assumptions..."

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  They analyzed her assumptions, but they also analyzed their assumptions. So you teach it a lot. So a lot of it was that they had to actually, later in the term, give each other feedback. The exercise was called Flowers and Onions. You had to give each person going around a room, a flower and an onion. They were terrified, watching them march off to go do this, and yet they found it the best exercise they ever did. So, giving and receiving feedback, basic influence, this was before the era of emotional intelligence, but I would certainly teach that now. The most important teaching was done through action learning, that we

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  did stuff in class that they reflected on in journals and tried to understand what happened and why it happened that way, etc.

• 1:07:18Dan Harris?

  I would love to see a study on whether the people who took that class were more successful than their peers.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am a firm believer that being interpersonally effective is critical to success, but not always, right? We have many exemplars in our current situation, in business settings, in public settings, in political settings. So, you know, you can't say it as a blanket rule, but the people that I know that really want to make a difference, understanding this instrument through which they're going to do it really is, this instrument being you, is really important. And they are willing to spend some time looking into

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  that. Poets write that we stay busy, busy, busy, busy, so we don't ever have to explore that world within, you know, we stay well away from it. And so, sort of, it does take some resolve, for sure.

• 1:08:25Dan Harris?

  I have a hunch. My hunch is that if, and maybe these studies have already been done, but assuming they haven't. That the results would be similar to Adam Grant's work on generosity in the workplace. Grant's work has shown, as I'm sure you know, that the most generous people are the most successful and the least successful. The variable is how are they generous? And if you are generous in a way that creates goodwill and also gives you energy, as opposed to being a sort of tragic and catastrophic altruist, giving in ways that deplete you, that you can rise to the top.

• 1:09:08Dan Harris?

  That doesn't mean people who are selfish are never successful, and as you said, we can point to lots of examples of that. It's just that, I think, for a young person or anybody really thinking about what kind of success they want to achieve, how do you want to do this? How will you feel about yourself at the end of the day if you succeed in a generous or interpersonally effective way as opposed to succeeding through slash and burn tactics? And I suspect you will enjoy your success a lot more in the latter circumstance.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Adam was one of our students. I was on his dissertation committee. And so I trust, I trust his work. He's got great insights. Yeah, I believe that. And sometimes, though, it takes going through a young person's period of total me focus, total focus on success, treating other people as instruments rather than humans, in order to get to this higher level of understanding of what really a successful life is all about.

• 1:10:10Dan Harris?

  That's really interesting, because I really went through that. I had a long, longer than I care to admit, period of total me-centeredness and started to change later in life. I wonder about that. Could I have started to change earlier, or did I really need to go through this? And it's not so much important as it pertains to me, but as it pertains to the advice I might give to young people now.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was talking to a CEO who basically had a similar pattern that you described, and his father described success to him in this sort of broader, more all-inclusive way. And he thought, Dad, you're all washed up. And then, of course, later in life, he came to see that his dad was completely right. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you have to. I mean, I certainly have, you know, I teach a lot of young people. I teach a lot of 28-year-olds and 38-year-olds. A lot of them are very thoughtful about this set of ideas around what it really means to truly lead. And so I don't know if you

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  have to, but I think that it's common. It's not necessary. And I do think the advice I would give is to keep talking about what a successful life means to you, so they have another model in their head, you know, as they're doing the me, me, me thing, that'll allow them to, you know, just be a little seed planted and growing, and allowing them to see that life could be about so much more, and their impact could be so much greater.

• 1:11:44Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna ask you my two closing questions. One is, is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Um, not really. No, I totally enjoyed this conversation with you about this set of ideas. I, I thought we would have more tension. I thought you would say, no, like, you know, this is too much do, do, do. You know, one of my, my good colleagues said, this is too linear, Sue. You set a goal, you do some experiments, you seek some feedback, you reflect. And her comment was the prompt for the emotion, like, let's put emotions in, because it's not linear. It's, it's emotion-filled, and it's fits and starts, et cetera. And then I thought your critique would be, it's too much in the head, and it's not about

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  emptying the mind of things and seeing what come. And, you know, when we first started this set of ideas, I did it with another colleague who since went a different direction, but we called these ideas mindful engagement. And we didn't mean mindfulness in the meditation sense, but we meant that you've got to learn to be more present in your experiences in order to take the learning from them. You know, there's a thing in the leadership literature called 72010 rule. Seventy percent of what leaders learn, they learn from their experiences, 20% from other people and 10% from books and readings. At least my book is on how you get more out

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  of the 70%, you know, because I wrote a book. But there's nothing inherent in going through an experience that makes you learn anything. It depends on what you do in the experience. And so being present, being mindful about how you show up, being mindful about where you want to grow and how you want to grow. That was our sense of it. And then it got renamed to the very confusing flexing afterward.

• 1:13:47Dan Harris?

  No, there's no tension. I think I would say that mindfulness meditation would supercharge everything you're talking about because it really is a training of the mind to be more awake and aware all the time. So I think it would be very helpful, but I don't think it's, I'm really dogmatically non-dogmatic about meditation and everything else. One of my jobs is to talk about its benefits and how to do it. And, but I don't think if you're not doing it, you're a failure.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's super helpful and I agree. And I'm very attracted to the ideas and I, I'm one of those people like I think I want to maybe plan to do it. So I'm still a little bit far away.

• 1:14:30Dan Harris?

  What are those cliches? When the student is ready, the teacher arrives or something like that. It's not a race. Whenever you get to it is the right time. The final question for me is just, just we've referenced your book, but can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other resources you've put out into the universe that you want people to know about?

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Oh goodness. It's called The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Achieve Big Life-Changing Growth.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Publishers are not shy about hyperbole. But I do think it's a set of ideas that are empowering and help people to grow to be the person they most want to be, and I like them for that. It's consistent with some ideas from Jerry Colonna's reboot. Mostly the idea that you're the instrument through which you do leadership, and you've got to pay some attention to that instrument if you're ever going to be a good leader, and I like that part. And then there's also a set of observations in a book called Ego-Free Leadership, put

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  out by the, some principals at an organization called Learning as Leadership out on the West Coast, that do some of the best personal development work for leaders that I know of. So I'd call out those two resources.

• 1:15:58Dan Harris?

  Great. Yeah, Jerry is, Jerry is my coach. I'm gonna talk to him later today.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Well, tell him I said hi, and I love his book. I already wrote him and told him, but...

• 1:16:08Dan Harris?

  I will tell him. Sue Ashford, thank you very much.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  You're welcome. It was my pleasure. Great to talk to you, and I hope that the ideas are useful for your listeners.

• 1:16:20Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Sue Ashford. Don't forget to check out the rest of our Sane and Ambitious episodes this week. Coming up on Wednesday, it's Jordan Harbinger. On Friday, it's Jonathan Fields. I'll put a link in the show notes to a whole playlist of prior Sane and Ambitious episodes if you want to check them out. Also, don't forget to check out what we're doing over at DanHarris.com, where you can chat about today's episode, and also get live AMAs with me, where you can do some meditation with me and then ask me anything. Just before I go here, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. E.J.

• 1:17:03Dan Harris?

  Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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