Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home | Anne Helen Petersen

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

In this week's episode, author and journalist Anne Helen Petersen covers some of society’s most pressing workplace trends - like the burnout epidemic and the transition to hybrid work - and how we can all thrive in the modern workplace.This is a conversation for employers, employees, and managers alike on how we can optimize remote work – and re-examine what “work” means in the first place.More on Anne Helen:Anne Helen Petersen is a journalist, author, and cultural critic known for her writing on celebrity culture, feminism, the future of work, and media.Anne’s career took off as a senior Culture Writer at BuzzFeed where she wrote several viral articles on pop culture and celebrity analysis – however, in 2020 she left the mainstream to start up her wildly popular Substack newsletter, Culture Study.In some of her more recent work – including her latest book Out of Office – Anne thoughtfully covers some of society’s most pressing workplace trends like the burnout epidemic and the transition to hybrid work.Anne and I were lucky enough to share the stage as speakers at a Microsoft event last year and after meeting her, I knew I had to have her on the podcast to dive deeper into her insights about the future of work._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Gervais by trade and training a high performance psychologist. And I'm really excited to welcome Anne Helen Peterson as our guest for today's episode. So Anne is a writer and journalist whose career took off as a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed, where she wrote several viral articles on pop culture and celebrity analysis. However, in 2020, she pulled the plug. She left mainstream to start up her wildly popular Substack newsletter, Culture Study. In some of her more recent work, including her latest book, Out of Office, which I love, and thoroughly covers some of society's most pressing workplace trends, like the burnout epidemic and the transition to hybrid work. So Anne and I were lucky enough to share the stage as speakers at Microsoft event earlier this year. And after

meeting her, I knew, I just knew that I had to have her on the podcast to dive deeper into the pearls of wisdoms and the insights that she has about the future of work, which is what we're all kind of navigating right now in a very challenging time. And so, Dr. Peterson, thank you for being here. I am incredibly excited to be able to have a conversation with you about the place that we spend most of our time for most of us, which is work. So how are you?

You know, I'm doing a lot right now. I feel like I'm going through a season of high intensity. And I've come to think of work that way for myself now, where I go through periods of concentrated, like a flurry of work, right? And doing lots of work travel and lots of work promotion and that sort of thing. And then I really like to try to plan these periods of rest and recuperation. And I think that that like for me personally, because I'm a freelancer and have the freedom to control my schedule in that way, that works really well for me. I get really invigorated, but then I need those periods where I'm also, you know, recovering, spending time by myself,

spending time, not moving those sorts of things. So how, all right, let's start with that, right? Because this is, this is a conversation that I think most people go, Oh yeah, I understand. I say it, you know, lovingly that I'm a professional sitter. And I think most people are professional sitters right now. I have earned my tight hip muscles. I've earned it. How about it? And so what are you doing to find balance? Because you've been working from home for a long time. And so how do you navigate this very simple dilemma, if you will, about you're working at home or living at the office? How do you balance that?

Well, I give myself a lot of permission to do things that aren't work during the day and to also set my own schedule about when work should reside, if that makes sense. So and again, this is a great freedom and it's facilitated by the fact that I am a freelancer and also that I don't have caregiving responsibilities as like a full-time parent. Right. And so I, you know, oftentimes there'll be a day in the middle of the week where I don't work at all. I also should say that I live on an Island, like an actual Island. I mean, you really unplugged. Yeah.

Of 900 people. And to get onto the mainland, you know, you have to take the ferry and then you drive into town and stuff. So if you want to go in and do errands or whatever, it takes time. And so I like having a day during the week when I do that to kind of break up the week. And then sometimes I'll do some work on a Saturday or on a Sunday. And to me, that doesn't feel like, oh, work is invading every corner of my life. I can't believe I'm working on the weekends. It's more like I'm doing work when I want to do work. I also I take care of my friends' kids after school. I pick them up after school every Tuesday and Thursday and hang out with them from 2 to 4 p.m. And so that's a time

when usually I would be doing work. But I am able to take that spot in the middle of the day and really concentrate and be present with them. And then oftentimes, right, 6 or 7pm, I sit down and I do some of those like email and administrative stuff that I would have done maybe at 2 or 3pm. So I time shift my day in a way that makes sense to me and also doesn't feel like I'm working all the time. Time shift. Yeah. Right. So that's a very specific term that you're using. Oh, I mean, it's a very made up term that I just started using. Yeah. But you're using it in a way like I'm shifting. I am controlling my time. Yes. And I think that's also the term flexibility.

I talk about this in the book in Out of Office. For a long time, flexibility was a word that was used by organizations to talk about organizational flexibility, their ability to rapidly hire and fire employees, to expand and to, what's the opposite of expand? Retract. Retract, yeah. And now this is kind of the pivot point of the pandemic. Now we think about flex, like that word flex that kind of gets thrown around in business environments

as employees' freedoms to change their work day or their work week or their work month in ways that work better for their lives. All right. So let's, let's start, let's start with something. Let's push back just a little bit to get some context because you, you hold massive unlocks for people that are trying to figure out the new work world, if you will. But so let's push back for just a moment. And I think it's most fitting to talk about the subtitle of your new book. And so the subtitle is The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. All right. So let's deconstruct that just quickly. Those are two really big rocks. So what is the big problem?

And then secondly, what's the bigger promise of working from home? Yeah, you know, my partner and I, Charlie Wurzel, came up with this idea to write this book about three or four months into the pandemic when we were seeing a lot of people struggling with working from home, not necessarily because of like the technology or anything like that more. How do I show my boss that I'm working really hard? How do I prevent work from seeping into every crevice of my life? And, you know, at that point in the pandemic, it was a specific moment when there just wasn't a lot of freedom, right? There wasn't a lot else to do. So I think in some cases people are like, well, I guess I'll work if I can't hang out with my friends and I

can't really leave my house, I guess I'll work. But I think that there were a lot of bad habits that we adopted during that time. People who were working from home during that time and frustrations, right? Especially people who didn't have consistent childcare and were trying to deal with juggling that while also working from home. So, but the other thing was that I, Charlie and I had been working from home for several years. We had moved from New York. We were both journalists, convinced our boss to let us move to Montana, report from there. And even before that, you know, I used to be an academic. I have a PhD in media studies and academics are essentially flexible workers. Besides a few constraints on when you need to be teaching a class or in office hours,

you really make your own schedule. So I had a lot of experience with enjoying the freedoms of that flexibility and also acknowledging how easy it is to just work all the time. And over the course of that time in Montana, Charlie also became acquainted with that, the difficulty of feeling like I have to be evidencing my work for my bosses constantly, like I have to be what we call in the book, LARPing our jobs, live action role playing our jobs and how exhausting that is and how it detracts from the actual work. What I appreciated about Charlie's narrative in the book was he's like, I don't know if I can do this. Yeah. Right. There was an anxiety for him saying, I'm going to miss out. Right.

There's like at least that's my interpretation of it and then so okay so what i hear you saying is like there's a seeping problem yeah and there's an evidencing problem and there's a rhythm of business maybe opportunity uh all of the flexibility but if are what those are at least two problems maybe one promise but But what are the other challenges or the problems? I mean, and this is something we kind of fast forward to in the book, is the very real problem of continual surveillance, right? And when employers say, well, we don't trust that our employees are actually doing the work or that we're getting our money's worth out of our employees. So we are going to institute surveillance software to make sure that they

are working all the times when they say that they are working. Everybody loves surveillance, right? This is universal, isn't it? You know, the more surveilled you are, the more trusted you feel, the better work you do. That is just a maxim. The more love you have for the person behind the eye of the camera. Yeah, no, and that's very dystopian. Yeah. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success.

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Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life

when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. I work in an industry just like you, which are highly motivated for the most part, right? Highly motivated. And they have the potential to make a lot of money. They have the potential to express their potential and be committed to it. They have the potential to do some very special things. Now, those are all really awesome privileges. And I think there's a uniqueness, too, because I don't know what the number is. You would know it. Is it 70%?

Don't get to kind of toggle between those in the most obvious way that the best athletes in the world or the most dynamic head coaches or business leaders are able to do as well. The way I think about it is like portable work versus non-portable work, right? So people who can make, because the thing is, is that, you know, who has a lot of flex in their work? Nurses, right? They can choose, okay, I want to do nights for three weeks and then I want to, or three days and I want to be off for four days, right? Like they can figure out schedules that work for their needs and their families. Firefighters, right? Like these are people who are frontline workers, who are essential workers, who work demand presence, but they also have a fair amount of flex. Okay. And a lot of people choose that work

in part because of that flex. Like they really like being able to control it in that way. So, but then I think you're right. Like the conversation that we always have to have is like, who has the privilege of being able to control how their workday goes. And oftentimes, you know, the people with the least financial privileges in our society. So people who are working hourly, minimum wage, retail jobs, those people now, because of the way labor laws have not necessarily caught up, they don't have a lot of control over like, even the day before they don't know when their schedule is going to be. And it's really difficult for coordinating childcare and that sort of thing.

So flexibility and control over when you work is an incredible privilege. And we do need to acknowledge that. Yeah, for sure. And even having the technology to be able, you know, in the environment to work in an environment that stimulates the creativity and the ability to work well, you know, without a bunch of banging in the background or whatever. So I was down and I was in a room in my home when this happened and there was no door. It was a basement. And we built like this loft type of experience in our house. And there was, so there's no door. So when I would do, when I would do a podcast, it was like quiet on set. And the family was like, Oh Jesus, how long is this going to be? Like, you know, I can't get in the kitchen. I can't, you know, so I was so obnoxious. And so when we had the chance to

actually go back and we, we have a studio now, um a studio now, out of home studio, they were like, I love you. Thank God. Get out of here. I mean, you're saying that my studio, which is my bedroom, is not incredibly – No, you had a door. He's sequestering the dogs. Yeah, you have a door. Yeah, right.

Okay, good. No, it does. It's like there's all sorts of things that um make it complicated but then i think about the fact that remote work has made it possible for me to live on this island yeah that's right you know i mean there's there's no small violence here like i you know i i'm i know we're both having fun and yeah and i know that from you because we got to share a stage and i got to see some of your humor and your seriousness as well. Wasn't that fun? Well, I think sometimes people at events like the one that where you and

I were, are a little bit taken aback by my frankness or my irreverence. And I think some of it comes from the fact that I am not from the world of work, right? I have not. I don't have an MBA. I've never taken a business class. You know, I am not from within this space. And that doesn't make my knowledge more valuable. It just makes it different, my approach to it. And I think the way that I first started really thinking about work was through the lens of burnout and also through a sociological lens. So thinking about the placement of work in our lives and

how it affects the rest of our lives. Let's go back to that philosophical position. I'd love to know how you wrestle that down about how and where labor sits in the human experience. If you had a, you know, as a reductionist right now, if you had two or three sentences to talk about it, how would you position that? You know, part of going through grad school, especially the type of grad school that I was in is also being exposed to Marxist thinkers, right? So people who are just questioning what work is for. And I think part of my thought process, my journey through reading all of these different theorists is saying, like, I am a person outside of my ability to labor, right? My value is not uniquely my ability to labor. If that were true, then people who can't labor, disabled people, older people, babies, they would have no value in our society. And sometimes I think that we actually do treat

people who can't labor for money that way. And I think that that's wrong. I think I agree. And I think you're right. I actually bristle to the word labor and work in some respects. There are some cultures that don't have a word for work. Right. And we talk about hustle hard, work hard, and da, da, da. And they don't even have a word for it. Yeah.

And so when I hear labor, like the way – I'll just share my framework here is that – well, let me go up one level or down one level into a tactic. So then the tactic that I've used in my profession is to meet people where they sweat. So I would not suggest to an athlete, hey, come into my office and we'll do some work. I meet them where they sweat. And that's the same approach for, and that's in athletics, and the same approach in business is meet them where they sweat. And that's the same approach for, and that's in athletics, and the same approach in business is meet them where they work. So psychology needs to be in the hallways, not in a private room with a deep, beautiful, wonderful conversation. Sometimes that is the right play, if you will.

And I think we all need to do that inner work, period. But meet them where they work. So the way that I think about my profession or the art and science that I'm trying to communicate is that it is an opportunity to – it's the craft. And so it's the opportunity or it's the working laboratory to understand mastery of self through mastery of craft. I love the name of this podcast, but yeah. You know, finding mastery for me is like, it doesn't, it labor feels like it's like a grind as, as, as opposed to a place where purpose is expressed. Yeah. And I would love, I'd love for you to push back or say, yeah, but you're missing this or go, yeah, that sounds good. So one way I think about it is how I talk about the work that I do

outside of my physical home. So I call that gardening. And it is a hobby for me. And I would not say that I have found mastery. I would say that I am finding mastery, like part of the joy is watching things grow. And part of the joy and growth is watching things die. And my partner, on the other hand, calls it yard work. Right? Because it is not something that he derives pleasure from. It is not something that fills his mind that he loves thinking about, right? Like it is just hauling bags from one place to the other. And I think that that to me is instructive. You know, the one I also sometimes dislike a framework in which everything that we do is broken down into these understandings of work and labor and how much it's worth,

like any amount of time is work. Because I think that like really feeds into productivity culture and all of those, I think, really harmful and toxic understandings. But at the same time, the one thing that often happens when we think of work as something that we do out of love or out of like a natural magnetism to something is that that work is then devalued, right? So this is, I think, especially true when it comes to feminized labor. So the work that people do in caregiving, whether it's for kids or people who are sick or people who are elders. And also for what's often known as passion work, things that are callings. Things that like, you know, we often say like, oh, you know, do what you love and you'll never work another day in your life. It's a famous phrase, I think mostly popularized by Steve Jobs and his commencement speech back in the early 2000s. Like just a

watchword, like just incredible guiding phrase for so many millennials who graduated into that time. And really what it means is like, do what you love and you'll work every day for the rest of your life, right? For not enough pay pay bad health insurance benefits no raises ever so I'm very careful with passion work um thinking through like how do we value our labor without also constantly just like breaking down the stuff that we do every day of our lives into these increments of like, how much I pay, am I paid for each activity, which I think is really, um, takes the love out of it, right? The romance out of work. I love the framing gardening versus yard work.

I love the framing there. And I love the counterintuitive insight you have, which is, um, passion can be code for don't ask for a raise. You're lucky to be here, right? Like this is your passion, right? So I really appreciate that. And I think the word, this passion bit is, has not been properly hydrated yet,

which is find the thing that you are passionate about and then you're okay. So if you love guitar, then play guitar. Okay. Hold on. What if we went upstream? Okay. And we said, I don't need to find this, the particular bank that feels safe and wonderful for me to have a great life. But if I go upstream and I say, I'm going to ride the rapids, the entire rapid with passion, everything I do, I can infuse with passion. So I don't need, this is now going even one level further upstream. I don't need my external world to be a certain way

for my internal life to be okay. And so that is like one of the insights that I'm not saying I have it wired by any means, but like that's really important to me. Yeah. I had this hippie boyfriend who had this look like he just wrote it on a little piece of paper and this little phrase next to his bed that said, what you are doing in your mind is what you are doing. Oh, my God. Yeah, so good. That's like good dirtbag wisdom, right? Yeah.

And for folks that don't know what dirtbag means it's like you know folks that climb it's an endearing he was a dirtbag climber yeah yeah so i'm gonna tell you a funny story one of my friends uh early on i didn't go to preschool like i came from a very very granola environment my parents dropped dropped out basically in the 60s, 70s. And I grew up on a farm where- Back to the land? Yeah. And so I didn't go to preschool. I can tell you a lot of stories about what it was like growing up that you'd be like, really? But so- Oh, I wouldn't be as surprised as you think. I know a lot of cow bags. Yeah.

Okay, good. So one of my friends, as we had our child and he's like four or five years old and says, listen, the most important decision you're going to make for your child might just be where you send them to preschool. And I thought, what, what kind of city shit is this? Like, are you kidding me? And so he's like, and he just looked at me like he knew. And so I was like, okay. And I didn't even, like I said, I didn't go to preschool. It wasn't really on my radar. And so there's lots of preschools to choose from in where I live in Los Angeles. So you'll appreciate this. So we went and we checked the facilities and looked around and asked questions. And my question for every one of the kind of head professors or head teachers that was walking us around was how often will my son, it was deadpan. How often will my son come

home with dirt under their nose? And if they're like, oh, not here. I was like, oh, thank you very much. And the one that goes, oh my God, they might not come home with clothes on. Like they get dirty here. I was like, sign us up. So it was great. You know, like someone come home, like no shirt on, like just in his underwear. And he's like a dirty mess because they're making mud pies. So this is actually a great segue that you've set up into thinking about, too, this conversation about labor. middle class bourgeois people raise kids is you think from the very beginning of kids as human capital with potential, right, to continue to grow in value and the way that you grow their value as human capital is to do things like find the right preschool, put them in enrichment programs, all of these things that are very much in line with how we grow money, right, or grow a company, and have very little understanding of the way that like, humans don't grow that way,

right? Like part of how you grew was by not having preschool. Part of how I grew as a person, you know, I might not have had all of the AP options for in high school that a lot of the people that I went to school with later on, had when they were in high school, I grew of the people that I went to school with later on had when they were in high school. I grew up in a small town in Idaho, but I grew up in a small town in Idaho, and that taught me a lot of other things too. And none of those things are things that we traditionally think of in terms of beneficiaries to human capital. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put

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creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, Thank you. at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. There's no magic wands about it, you know, about parenting for sure. But if you could speak some insight or principles or philosophy or even a set of practices for if you were parenting a 13 or 14 year old, like what would be some of the things you would say to the parent? So this is actually a great moment to ask this question because I was just talking with a bunch of readers and on Twitter about the idea of teen babysitting and how a lot of parents I know have struggled to find that babysitter who just comes over for a couple hours so that you can go out, right? Just a couple hours. And that was a position that was

historically filled by neighborhood teen babysitters, right? And there are many reasons for the teen babysitter shortage. One of them is that there is just a loosening in community ties. So a lot of people just don't know anyone in their community who has teens. One of them is that people don't trust their kids with teens because they just think that they're not capable, even though most people that I know were themselves babysitting toddlers when they were around 11 or 12. Right. Another one is that they cost too much, that teens are charging too much money. Even though oftentimes like the teen babysitting going rate is often like 15 to 20.

So above minimum wage. And there's an argument like, oh, this teen knows what they're worth, right? Because they could otherwise go and work at Target, even though you could say, oh, well, this is a better opportunity because you can really control how many hours you work. But the last one, which really troubles me, is that teens are too busy to babysit. And when I look at that, and there are a of parents who of teens who were telling me this like my teen and it's not that they're too busy because they're working another full-time job because that's a different conversation it's more my teen has all of these activities

right they're in this club they're the head of this thing they are playing this sport which requires them to travel every single weekend and then they're also in this club sport which requires this and if your teen does not have time to babysit for two to three hours a week, your teen is too busy. Because so much of time, so much of my development as a writer, as a thinker, as a person involved like staring at the ceiling while listening to like a Fiona Apple CD on repeat, right? Like that space of nothingness. And I think we understand this to some extent, even if we don't practice it with young kids, that like boredom is valuable. But boredom is also valuable with teens and giving space to

try to figure things out instead of the impulse to overprogram to mature that human capital, which I think is at work with a lot of parents who are concerned about their kids getting into college. Yeah. I bristle in the workplace and certainly the way you framed it, which I never had that framing before about kids, about human capital. It is really cold. It's designed not from a human standpoint, even though the words in it. And so I love that. And how do you create, so this is, this is going to tie right back into the hybrid workforce or the hybrid work challenge is like, how are you creating blank space, mind wandering time, you know, stages of potential boredom or massive insight? Like how are you creating that? Or is it radically

organic? And you're like, you know what, when I'm tired, I just kind of sit back and close my eyes or doodle or whatever. Or it's like, no, no, no, I've got three hours a week. I'm scheduling my mind wandering. I don't love to like hyper schedule it because I think that that puts it like it feeds my worst impulses of hyper-scheduling. But I do things like I go on long walks with my dogs by myself and I refuse to take the phone with me. And first of all, I'm lucky that I live in a place where that is safe. But I think leaving the phone makes it so that you just cannot distract your mind with a podcast, with texts, with anything else. You're the second or third person that's mentioned that like this week to me about like walking and not having. So I'm in a bad rhythm, I think, is because it's my audible book time.

It's my phone. It's my catch up time. But that's good, too. Right. Like and I used to always I used to be like, OK, I got to listen. I have to keep up on all these cool podcasts, right? And I need to listen to them while I make food, like while I'm cleaning. And I do oftentimes listen to podcasts while I'm gardening or something like that. But I also gave myself permission a while ago to not listen to every podcast, which would be impossible anyway. But sometimes when someone says like, oh, you got to listen to this new podcast, I'll say, I'm actually trying to listen to fewer podcasts.

Except for Finding Mastery, of course. So how about this one? I bought your book to read it. And then I was like, no, I want to listen to it. And so you got to double for me. But there is something that I really love and I'm glad you brought it up because I was feeling a little weird. Like, I wonder if I'm doing a little too much on like my walks and I am going to try it.

You know, like it's hit me in the last couple of days. Like put your phone down. Like people are saying it when you're walking. And so, yeah, I'm going to do that for sure. That's really cool. All right. The other thing too is running. I think a lot of people have become addicted to listening to things while running or while exercising generally.

Or people who like, you know, I do a lot of Peloton who keep their phone with them while they're Pelotoning. One of the great things for me with Peloton is like, I'm always working hard enough that I can't look at my phone. Like, and I do not bring my phone into the room. So I can't grab for it during like a rest period. It's really important to have that distance. You know what we're talking about, though, is multitasking.

We're talking about pulling, you know, we're talking about pushing your desk back. So how do we relate this back to the hybrid experience? Because I think that there's a discipline required to do what you and I are talking about. And then there's also, and there's a fear. There's a fear, not that somebody's watching from the corner from, you know, the camera lens, but there is a fear that about efficiency, that my fear is that there's one person in particular that I'm like, well, what is happening over there? You know, like really what is getting done? Is that, is this person working with passion to their, and, and, and really working towards the shared purpose that we're agreeing to, you know, celebrate our gifts and talents towards.

And there's another person I'm concerned about that is working 80 hours and not sleeping right and is so far into the purpose of our company that I'm concerned about burnout. So I've got both things happening. And so I wonder if you want to, let's start there and then let's work backwards to multitasking discipline and all that. Yeah, this is a great question. So I think that a lot of workers have this internalized surveillance, right? So like you said, it's not like you are watching them all the time, but they want to behave as if you are watching them all the time. They are almost paranoid that if someone were to pop in at some moment, they'd be like, you could be doing more work here. And then I think there is also this understanding

in contemporary work culture that immediate responsiveness is the same as good work. We mistake all of these different things to that are associated with contemporary work culture responsiveness um meetings uh i think like constantly demonstrating presence on apps like slack and through emails and through various different things that ping you constantly, we mistake those things for getting good work done. And obviously all those things are sometimes

needed to get good work done, but they get in the way of doing good work because sometimes the thing that allows us to do the best work is incredibly invisible. And to me, those things are thinking, right? Or spending time with other people's thoughts. So reading deeply and immersively. Creative work, which oftentimes just involves like not doing the thing that you're doing right and then rest and like this is the thing that i like i have tried like my my thinking on this as a person who thinks about work is really really mixed in with my thinking my my evolve my evolution as an athlete too in terms of understanding the purpose of rest, that you cannot just work all the time, right? You cannot have five hard workouts and expect to just continually increase in your abilities. Rest is so essential. And any athlete will tell you, like, if you try to do that,

if you just try to continue to work out hard every single day, you're just going to injure yourself and you're gonna be chronically injured. and you're going to put yourself out of the game. And that's the same with work, right? You are going to be a chronically injured employee in terms of work. And that I think we are very bad at seeing that clearly. And so the symptom is. Is excessive busyness.

Yeah. And you're saying the root cause of that is a worry that somebody else will perceive them as not doing enough. So there's an excessive... You can see how this relates to millennials, particularly as we were told from a very young age that we were spoiled and lazy, right? And so there's a reaction to that, particularly, I think, amongst older millennials who were very subject to that understanding.

But then also, I think it's precarity, right? It's instability. So if you think that you should be grateful at any given point for the job that you have, and that you could lose it as well, like that the bottom could drop out at any moment, and you'll be back in your parents basement and shamed. That really motivates a certain style of work. And so how can you alleviate precarity? Well, you can financially alleviate it, right? You can have a salary that makes someone feel comfortable, and have benefits that make it so they're not constantly worried about their physical health. But then you can also alleviate it from a management's perspective as well. And I think a lot of times people who are doing that very, who are trying to demonstrate their business constantly, right, who are always trying to reply

to emails on at midnight on weekends are trying to demonstrate their, you know, their responsiveness. They do not have enough clear communication from their managers about the work that they are doing, or they are subconsciously being praised for that, right? So they see that as doing good work. And maybe they see that actually modeled by their managers who do that sort of performance of busyness for their bosses. So it's endemic in the organization. What about folks that are non-millennials that are, you know, used to the workplace being eight to six, nine to five, whatever it might be, and that are displaced in some respects? Because it's a mixed thing that's taking place right now, which is, what's the number? I don't have them handy.

I know you do, which is there's like people want to go to the office and most people are reporting that they want to go to the office three days a week, not full time. Yep. Right. And so it's like I want to be around people and I want to be in the rhythm of business and I also really like not having drive time. Right. And it's, so it's like, I want to be around people and I want to be in a rhythm of business and, and, and, and, and I also really like not having drive time. Yeah. And I kind of nestled into the way that I'm working at home and it feels pretty good, but some days I want to be near the water cooler and I want to be around, you know, those, those conversations. So what, what is the data and then what is it like for folks that are non-millennials that are leading and thinking about some of the leading insights that you might have? Yeah, there's so much here.

I really rely on Slack's Future Forum data here. that they started, I think, three months into the pandemic, and they surveyed 10,000 workers over six countries and have been doing it every quarter. So it's really good data. And their most recent report, they really show, and this has been pretty consistent since people have been going back into the office, is that people do want two to three days, right? But the desire for flexibility, both in where they work and when they work, is highest amongst parents, mothers and fathers, and is also highest amongst employees of color. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that, and they have a lot of data on this, like feelings of belonging in the workplace actually went up as workplaces went remote. So what do you think is going on there?

It's that the workplace itself is a place where people who are white, right? Like the monoculture, the status quo is it's a place that's very comfortable for white people, right? And whether it's having to police yourself in terms of how you dress in order to, you know, look professional or just dealing with microaggressions, all sorts of things, right? It just feels better, I think, for many employees of color to not have to be in the office every day. It's less exhausting. And then also, if we look at people who are higher level manager, and this, I think, makes sense with the anecdotes that we hear from the workplace, people who are higher in the management chain want to be in the office more than people who are not in the C-suite and executives and that sort of thing. And also, this is interesting, and this is very vivid in the last report. People who are higher in the management chain are more burnt out, specifically middle managers are super burnt out, and executives are incredibly miserable right now. The data is just stunning,

and especially over the last quarter. And I think a lot of that misery comes from trying to balance the fact that like, they very clearly see the benefits of being in the office, in part, because the work that they do is very much and historically has been rooted in like being around other people managing by walking around, right? Whereas and also, statistically, people who are in the c-suite live a lot closer to the office so the commute not as much of a big deal they're probably older so they're not dealing with smaller children and things like school pickup that sort of thing but then so right now they're dealing with that they're like why why we've done all these nice

things why do these other people not want to come back into the office? And don't understand this pushback, this continual pushback of like, no, this ship has sailed. We're not coming back into the office five days a week. No way. Right. So you can see that sort of misery derived from trying to balance those those competing desires of what they personally experience with what they are hearing from their workforce. Taco Tuesday failed. It did. Six months ago, everyone's like, Taco Tuesdays, we're back. It's not enough. It was not enough.

Yeah. But they came for the tacos, by the way. They came in for tacos. And then when Taco Tuesday went away, they went back home. They're like, no, no, thanks. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines

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I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. If you could speak directly to, with all of your insights and research and understanding of the hybrid workforce and your point of view, if you could speak directly to C-suite executives, what do you say to them? I would say that flex is a compromise and that it's okay to say, you know, we hear we hear you, we hear that this is what you want flexibility and time and and where you work. But also, that might mean that we're going to kind of change up the way that the workplace itself works. So it's not going to be exactly the same either. So maybe

not everyone has their same desk, right? There has to be some give and take. And I think that's something that that workers need to be a little bit more flexible on too. The other thing I would say is that like, it's kind of like parenting in terms of like, if you trust your workers, like you trust your teens, they're going to behave in ways that are trustable. If you treat them like small children who you have to watch everything that they do, they're going to act out. Right. And I'm not trying to be like infantilizing here i just think that when you infantilize your employees then they behave like infants right and then the last thing i would say is that there is oftentimes especially if the c-suite is older and i'm talking probably older than like 45 older than 50 they do not understand the possibility they do not understand the the

potential for actually building meaningful friendship and culture in online spaces and that's not their fault they just didn't grow up making good friends online right so they don't understand that that's something that actually can be forged. It takes hard work, especially on an organizational level, but it is possible. And so that's, I think, the three things. The other thing, too, just and this is kind of like the code of our book, is that you can try to make these hard changes now and they take time and they're going to be iterative. Or you can wait five to 10 years and then pay a consultant a lot of money to tell you to make the changes you should start doing now. Call Dr. Peterson. All right. So if you could speak right into vice presidents. So it's not the C-suite. One step down, presidents and vice presidents.

Put them together. And each business has a different code for what the second layer is, right? Not code, but a description. So if you were to speak to that second level, presidents, vice presidents, or GMs, whatever it might be. Oh, I think those people are dealing with a lot of burnout. And part of it is they are trying to both, they're trying to juggle the demands of the people in the C-suite with the equally strong demands of the people, the rest of the workforce. And they are forced to be interpreters for both sides.

And that's exhausting. I also think that they're burnt out because most places have not done extensive training in management generally, but specifically in management in hybrid scenarios, because it's a different skill set. It really is. And you can't solve it by having a one-time optional webinar. It's ongoing training and thinking about the skills that need to be refined in order to master that type of management. And what are some insights that you would consider or want them to consider or wrestle with? So you're seeing them. You're saying, listen, I see you. You're managing up, managing down. You're caught between. It's like you're being pulled apart from the seams. You're not trained for this. So are you speaking to their head or their heart? And then that's a question in part two is like, what would you want them to wrestle

with or deeply consider? I mean, I think the hard part is that empathetic acknowledgement of like, I see you in that struggle and I know that you're burnt out and we need to come up with solutions for that because it's not enough for us to just pile like more training on your plate like we need to actually think through how do we give you short-term rest and then longer-term sustainability in your job i think because we are at the point you know nearly three years or two and a half years into the pandemic that you know most people are burnt out in terms of like hit the wall climb the wall kept going it's like they ran a marathon and then are like okay another marathon let's keep going and your fueling is just out you feel

kind of nauseous but like you feel like you just have to and you're gonna lose those people in the job market like they i think right, even if it's an organization that people want to be a part of, the only solution at some point is to break up and start over again. So that's one thing to consider is like, okay, how can we actually have an intervention here to confront this current situation of burnout? And then looking forward, how do we equip them with the skills to better manage in a hybrid scenario? And some of that is like doing trainings with people who know more than I do about really good management. And there are people out there who really do. But then it's also just like basic things like taking enough off of their plate so

they can actually develop those mentoring relationships with the people that they are managing. I think most people in those VP positions are incredibly overscheduled and it makes them worse at what they do because there's too much on their plate. I'm saying yes to all that. I'm working with a, right now, an enterprise company that is dynamic world world leading in what they produce and products and services and i'm thinking right now of a president who is um um i mean you paint the picture smart smart, hardworking, big purpose, huge heart, really cares, can deal with complex variables with speed and accuracy.

And it's like, oh, my gosh, it is. I would love to work with him alongside him for him. If I was part of that company, it it's like this super like very switched on with deep empathy and i go um when i when i push back to kind of get some perspective i go oh this person's suffering yeah like like really suffering because of the the hard-working ambitious part meets the deep empathy it's like, it's like this tail that eats its snake that the clock never stops. I don't know why I just mixed metaphors there, but they're always, always, always either caring or grinding or caring or grinding. And it's like,

you can't keep doing it. So how do you suggest that folks that are maybe see themselves in what I just described, how do you suggest that they manage their inner life and then manage the people around them? And you could say lead their inner life or lead the folks around them. Oh, man, I feel like you're a much better person for this question. Like this is a good therapy question, right? Like I think that people in those positions like really they need a good work therapist to work through those questions. Because if you are taking on all of that empathetic weight and then also are expected to be high performing, you are doing two jobs at least. In some respects, it is so much easier.

It's not right, but it's so much easier to be more like an armadillo, just cold and kind of do your thing. You had a big show, just marching forward, you know, like, but it, they ascertained that these execs are miserable is things like feelings of frustration at work, like inability to focus, you know, all of these overall scores just really plummeting. It's not that they're like just saying, you know, I'm like a write-in thing. I'm miserable. Sometimes people react to stats that say, oh, bosses are miserable. They're like, good, right? They're making all the money. They should be miserable. Like that's just the status of like being a leader or whatever. It's a very animos, like a very, I think, uncharitable way of thinking about it. But the other thing too is when a boss is miserable, that misery floats down, right? Like if a boss is burnt out, that misery floats down.

If a boss is burnt out, that burnout floats down too. Because if you're burnt out, then you're not managing your work well and it overflows onto other people who then burn out and it overflows. These are problems that are not limited to one individual. They're very much a problem that the entire organization has to grapple with. You know that phrase, you can't give what you don't have? Yeah. There needs to be kind of a second part of it is you do give what you do have. And if you have anxiety, burnout, frustration, intolerance, fatigue, you are giving that. Yeah. And so even though benevolently, aspirationally, people don't want to give

those to other folks. They understand that this is not right. But when you walk in to an environment with that as kind of the epicenter of how you are thinking and feeling, it's really difficult to do anything other than that. Maybe it's an eye roll. It's a cut of the eye. It's an exhale. It's a hands hits the table. It's something that. It's a, you know, hands hits the table. It's something that might not be demonstrative, but it's there and people feel that. So, okay. This is like super applied. It's also really thoughtful. And I wonder if I could just take a pause and ask you this as well, which is like thinking about the future is like, let's go two to three years out. What are some of the most interesting or unexpected ways that you've,

you think leadership will look like in two to three years? It's a, you know, whenever anyone says that's a good question on a podcast, that means that they don't have the answer yet. Right. But oftentimes good questions are questions that don't inspire an immediate answer. and it's hard because part of the way that you get to the top is by not resting, right? At least in our current understanding of how work works. But if the other employees in an organization look upwards for their understanding of what good work looks like, work that is valued within the organization, then if you have a burnout problem, it starts at the top almost always. Right. This insight is great. Dr. Peterson, this is why I love having conversations with smart people. And because and then can I can I would it be OK if I

if I refined it just a little bit? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Rest versus recovery. Right. And so, yeah. So this is one of the advantages of being in high-performing sport for 20-some years is that recovery is the thing that we talk about most. Because to your point earlier, we can't grind at this ridiculous superhuman way without a compromise. But grinding will get you good, maybe really good. It might earn a spot in the high-performing team that you want to be on or even the world stage. Grinding will get you good. But what got you here won't get you there is also a truism that we pay attention to in sport.

So grinding will get you good, but it is not a pathway. There's not an unlock to flourishing. There's not an unlock to mastery. There's not an unlock to having a zest and a zeal and a sustainable fire and a deep passion, it will not get you there. So it's the stress kind of colloquially said by hard work and then with equal units of recovery. So I love that you went there, that the future of work will be,

that one of the unlocks for the future of work and great leadership will be about the sophistication of putting recovery into the rhythm of business, which is what we've been doing in elite sport, call it for the last 10 years. Well, and this also, I think, cues into our earlier conversation about parenting, right? So I've been thinking a lot about my late adult onset athleticism, which is a long phrase of saying that I've like gotten really into sports as I've gotten older. I'm a lot slower now than I thought. I'm a lot slower. I'm a lot slower, but I love it. Like I just ran my first marathon. I'm stronger than I've ever been in my life. I hated sports when I was a kid. But part of the reason that I think I am able to take such joy in it, one, my body isn't worn out.

Right? And two, also, I did not ever burn out on sports when I was a high school and college athlete. So one of my best friends, incredible, phenomenal soccer player in high school, you know, did the club sport, went all over the state, recruited to play D1, you know, whole thing. She can't like her body, she's had three surgeries on her knee. She still loves the sport and like coaches our kids team, but she can't do it anymore. And her relationship to athleticism is incredibly different. And I wrote a piece a couple of months ago about like just like rediscovering the joy of running and this sort of thing and like what it feels like to do this at age 40, 41. And the number of people who wrote me talking about their own burnout experiences in high

school and college and only now coming back. And I think that this, you know, talking about you can grind to greatness when you're a kid, you can grind to greatness in terms of academic achievement, right? And just doing everything all the time. And maybe you won't burn out in college. Maybe it'll take until grad school. Or maybe you will burn out in college. And I see that a lot with people who go to high performance, like really competitive

high schools. But it's the same thing. If you do not ever have any space in your life, not only for rest, but for that understanding of recovery too. And sometimes that means things like, oh, I don't go straight from finals to like some, you know, another very intense experience. Sometimes that means like actually having cathartic rest and recovery. It all is interlocked, I think. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts

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when you use the code finding mastery at checkout that's lisa l-e-e-s-a.com the promo code is finding mastery for 25 off and then plus an extra $50 on us because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance so this is one of the insights in and maybe there's a unlock here for you as well, is that in sport, we know that if we just recover at the end of the season, we're going to have a lot of injuries throughout. And so we've paid a lot of money and deeply invested in people that are able to do something extraordinary. We need to take care. We need to hold that human experience in a very precious way. And so the sophistication of recovery has led to very specific daily practices.

So this is not just the weekend practice. If I lay over into the workforce, it's not just recover on Saturday and Sunday. And by the way, people drink on drink on Friday and they're not even close to recovery on Saturday. And if you have a binge drink on Friday, you know, it's 72 hours before your brain and recovery is getting even close to right. Anyways, it's a daily slice. It's a thin slice of recovery. And if you can get that thing right, and you can use some technology that you have on your wrist and you can use all a bunch of other markers that if you get the daily rhythm right, the output is actually extraordinarily high. And because the process and the performance standards are being met on a regular basis. So there is a flywheel effect of getting thin slice recovery right.

And, you know, grandma got these things right. And she said eat your vegetables get your sleep honey you know make sure that you have good friends and you're you're having a good time in life you know don't think take things so seriously like there's lots of ways yeah yeah like the the labor movement of the 20th century and early 19th century was like eight hours for work eight hours for rest eight hours for what you will right and that is an understanding of like is that where it came from yeah you you say that to me like it's stupid yeah of course that's where i had no i had no idea eight

hours for sleep eight hours for work and then eight hours for what you will which is like family fun whatever yeah like figuring out what you like, which is like family fun, whatever. Yeah. Like figuring out what you like. Right. And, and how many, how often do like, how many people do you know who actually have do those eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will? No, no. You know, so we know this from research is five days at five hours of sleep. You couldn't pass a drunk driving test right from a from a vigilance standpoint binge from a vigilance standpoint yeah that's awful because when we ask when i ask folks like in you know businesses of speed and accuracy and i ask them like how's the

sleep going and just raise your hands type of thing most people people are around six, barely in the game, like barely in the game. And then it used to be when I asked that question like 10 or 15 years ago, nobody would want to say eight because it's like, oh, you're not working hard. You're not a grinder. Now, with the right air cover from extraordinary leaders, people are like, yeah, I'm getting my eight in. I'm competing my ass off. Are you kidding kidding me i want to be great here for you guys i'm getting it in that's a really cool way to think about nicole davis is an olympian and medalist and we're fortunate enough to work with her at finding mastery and she's got a great saying which is fatigue is inevitable burnout is not yeah right it's like burnout doesn't have to happen, but fatigue is part of

the game. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, I think the other thing that's been useful for me, and I think for other people who have slightly broken brains from productivity culture is one of the Peloton instructors that I love, Matt Wilpers. He, you know, you spend a lot of time when you're doing power zone rides, like it's like 60 minutes, 90 minutes, you're just hanging out with this guy. And so he talks a lot. And one of the things he talks a lot about is how rest is part of working out. Right. And if you can think in your brain, your scheduling brain of this day that I'm resting is also part of my workout, then that's at least a useful tool to get started, right? To be like rest day is working out day.

It's a full-time job in some respects. Like when you don't have it kind of a rhythm of it, like you really have to think about recovery. Sleep is a big one. And, you know, unfortunately, there's a, one of the early podcasts that we had was one of the great coaches in American football from a college level. And he's like, I never talked about this before. But and he's one of the all time winning coaches. And he says, I used to meditate and I closed my door. I would meditate for 15 minutes a day, but I never would tell anybody because they would think I was weird. Well it's certainly not weird now. And then he'd say I would also take a nap a 15 minute nap but I didn't want to tell any of the other coaches because you know they would think I was lazy. Right. And I was like oh my god like he was way above or way way beyond what the expectations are now. And but it's still not cool to take a nap at work, even though it might be something great. On Mad Men, there's all these scenes where Don Draper, well, first of all, he drinks all the time and that sort of thing.

And that's a different conversation. But he also takes a lot of naps in the office. He goes to the movies a lot, right? Just in the middle of the day, he goes to see a movie by himself. He's also like the most brilliant admin in the organization. And it's fascinating to watch, I think, ourselves as viewers respond to those activities, right? To be like, oh, my God, what a piece of shit. Like, he's just not like, must be nice, just like napping in the office.

And you're like, actually, this is how creativity work. And a lot lot of people you know have worked with this you can you can read these studies you can like know oh yeah i'm supposed to walk around the block to like get my best ideas or whatever but because our culture sends us all of these messages that unless you are doing unless you are sending unless you are visibly producing you are not not working. It's really hard to, to unmap that from our brains. Love that. I don't really know the show so much, but I, I, the vibe I get is like this misogynistic type of, you know, I mean, yeah, but it also is an interesting meditation on creativity in that way. So, so this is where I wanted to go with you is that if you, so we were talking about speak right into leaders and you know, if you could speak into women in the workforce right now, what pearls of wisdom or what, what do you say to them?

Well, I think most women are doing absolutely the most work that they can do. I think actually like instead of, you know, this is one of those cases where the advice is actually better directed at the people who aren't women, maybe. And what I would say is that there is a lot of maintenance and care work that is fundamental to your organization that is currently being performed mostly by your your female workforce and because those skills aren't valued as promotable skills as um skills elevated skills skills that people talk about and in meetings and that sort of thing unless it's like an offshoot of like oh yeah and thanks karen for taking notes or whatever like they are they are absolutely essential to the well-being of the organization, but they are not valued.

So instead of speaking to women, I think I would speak to the people in the organization who are accustomed to not seeing that labor and not valuing it. I just had this, I oftentimes do these just kind of open-ended Q&As on my Instagram account for fun of like, who is the linchpin in your organization who if that person left, everything would fall apart, right? They are the institutional knowledge bearers. They are the person who keeps the trains running on time, you know, and some of the answers are obvious. It's like, oh, yeah, it's the administrative assistant or like that sort of person.

But there was not a single example of someone who is not a woman because i asked for like highly specific you know who is the person in your organization and it's like oh it's linda who's 50 and is the only person on our team who actually knows how to use sales force right or like you know they are the person And I think that is a chronically undervalued skill just generally. And also like if you're thinking about work culture, like part of the reason people are sometimes miserable is because the people who do that work, sometimes it's, you know, remembering it's someone's birthday. Sometimes it's also the DEI work or work that allows people to feel visible and welcome to your organization. Sometimes it's just soft mentorship skills. That stuff is just not valued enough. And that's what needs to happen. So you're speaking to a manager or leader of a different gender saying,

make sure you got this, make sure you see this and recognize the value in that. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you don't, and that person leaves, you're screwed. You know, like that person is fundamental to your organization. There's a hole. So Microsoft did a massive bit of research on hybrid. And they asked something nearly 30,000 people, 31 countries. And they had an interesting study that conflicts with Cisco's findings. And again, an equally robust study.

And so one of the findings I wanted to ask you about and just see how you can help me interpret this is that between 50 and 55% of employees from the Microsoft study that were either remote or hybrid said that they feel lonelier at work than before going hybrid or remote. And then Cisco came out with their findings that 74 percent said that hybrid working has improved their family relationships. Yeah. So, okay, how do I interpret that?

Or how do you interpret those two disparate findings? First of all, I think the one thing that we need to think about with any data coming out of the last two years is that we have only recently started to come back into a situation where people feel safe being in group situations at all. Right. So especially the data from early in the pandemic or like even a year in, you know, they're like the co-working situations were not set up like it was just so hard to leave your home in any capacity. People, I think, had not yet started to imagine the ways that like, oh, I can go work at my friend's house. Right. Like and I do this with my friend here on the island. We oftentimes just go over to each

other's house and just kind of work across the table from one another. So there are ways to alleviate those feelings of physical loneliness. And I think oftentimes the increased feeling of loneliness at work was also a reflection of just increased loneliness in life. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And also, I think at a lot of companies, everyone has been so overwhelmed that there have been either hackneyed or unsuccessful attempts at trying to figure out what hybrid culture looks like. And that was exacerbated in some ways through calls to return to the office where people would return into the office, even if it was for two or three days a week and no one else would be there, right? Because it wasn't coordinated in any way. And it also wasn't communicated why you need to be in the office in the first place. So it feels really

lonely to go back into an office and no one else is there, right? So I think that's all true. And I think we are still in the process of figuring out what the future of work culture is going to look like. If you contrast that with the feelings that people have of feeling closer to their friends and family, I mean, they're literally closer, but also they're able to be present with their kids in ways that they weren't before. Like I know a lot of parents who are like, I get to actually go to the afterschool games, right? Like I can go,

I can pick up my kid. We go to a practice for an hour and then I, you know, I pick up and do some email later in the day, but I can be there. I can be, um, my days aren't as regimented by like having to be in the office from this time to this time so I can make time with my family happen outside of the frantic morning time and the sort of hellish back from school, get dinner on the table, get into bedtime. You know, the research around burnout. Is it more prevalent for hybrid employees versus all in in office employees or all remote? Like, is there is there something here that you've got some tells on? Yeah, no, I don't. The crosstabs aren't there quite yet. And I think part of that is that, like, people's work situations continue shifting. Right. So, like, it's hard to like, they're like,

am I a hybrid employee? Am I an office employee? Like, you know, because policies have continued to change. And even until very recently, so many large employers, particularly in tech, didn't have people back into the office with any sort of consistency. So I think that like, they just haven't, we haven't figured it out yet um because the the consistency isn't there i think that people working hybrid or working remotely are at risk for burnout if they don't have going back to a previous point in our conversation if they haven't figured out the discipline and i don't mean this in like a austere way, but like the, the small things that make it so that you can have bumpers coming in and out of work. Right. So things like I go take a walk

with my dogs first thing in the morning. That is how I begin my work day. And then I go exercise at the end of my day. That is how I ramp off of my workday, right? And that is, you know, it's a very effective psychological placement there, but in much more ecologically friendly and time friendly than say, going commuting anywhere. But that's something that I have to really practice is trying to figure out, okay, how am I going to ramp on and ramp off of my workday? And I think that like that I hear from a lot of people about the things that they miss about going into work. It's not necessarily the office itself, right? It's the practice of going into work because it allows them, it's a shortcut to that sort of discipline. So how do you figure out how

to do that in this new situation? It's a learning curve. That is a great insight. And there's a thing that we would do in sport is when you take your shoes off, when you take your cleats off, when you take whatever, and you leave them in your locker, and then you put your civilian clothes back on, that work is done. And I would always encourage athletes who are like, yeah, I'll do some imagery later or I'll do some film stuff at home. No, no, do it here. Do it in the context of the rhythm of work so it's not you're having to kind of jam it in in a weird way later. So there is that time bound.

I like the way you talked about it. There's an ease in the threshold of when you enter and leave. And on the same part, the things that I'm missing from being having a remote setup is the 30 minutes it takes me or an hour with traffic to get into the office. I would have had some fitness. I would have had a little downtime walk with the dog. I would have, you know, and so that I think it's just like, I don't know. I think that these are some of the interesting little taxes for folks. And if leaders can be understanding of it, and I don't think leaders want to necessarily be in the office.

No. You know, five days a week either, right? The other thing is that most leaders haven't been for a really long time, right? Leaders have always had flex. There's a great quote that I got at the very beginning of my reporting on flexibility is that like leaders have always had flex. The reality now is that it's just trickling down and you're trying to deal with the ramifications of that. Dr. Peterson, thank you. It's like your insights are just kind of endless.

And so I want to say thank you for coming on and spending your precious time here. And then as well as all of the work you're doing to help guide folks in this turbulent time for trying to figure out a better way to work and to fit, quote unquote, labor into the rhythm of life. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that I recently launched a podcast with Crooked Media all about work. So it's called Work Appropriate. You can find it anywhere. Okay. And then how about your blog? Where do we drive people to your blog? You can Google my name and newsletter or culture study. It's at annhellen.substack.com.

Perfect. And what about social? Do you have any handles? Oh, yeah. You know, Ann Helen on Twitter and Ann Helen Peterson on Instagram. E is all the way through. I'm a good Norwegian. It's just E-E-E all the way. All right. So thank you so much. And maybe we write a book on recovery or not a book, but maybe we write a little blog or something on recovery and the rhythm of work. That would be fun. Listen, thank you for your insights. It's great to know you're out in the world and it's great to share a stage and now a microphone. And so hopefully our paths cross in person soon. And I just want to say thank you again. Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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