Good Life Project - How to Thrive in a Rapidly-Changing Work World | Gabriella Rosen Kellerman

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

How do you get through each day, let alone build a meaningful, connected and rewarding career when rapid-fire, constant change, groundlessness, unrelenting pace, overwhelm, and even workplace toxicity have become the norm?That’s where we’re headed with my guest today, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman. Her new book, Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work—Now and in an Uncertain Future which was co-authored with renowned psychologist Martin Seligman, also known as the father of positive psychology, offers critical insights for facing a wildly fluctuating, seemingly perpetually unstable future of work. And in our conversation today, we explore a bit of Gabriella's background and her own trajectory in her career before diving into five science-backed strategies or workplace superpowers that can help us all thrive at work. From resilience to building rapid rapport at work, there's a lot of great insight to learn here.You can find Gabriella at: Website | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with DJ DiDonna about professional sabbaticals.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED: We’re looking for special guest “wisdom-seekers” to share the moment you’re in, then pose questions to Jonathan and the Sparked Braintrust to be answered, “on air.” To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount CodesPeloton: Work out anytime, anywhere with the Peloton App. New Members who choose monthly billing get a 30-day free trial, or choose annual billing and get 12 months of Membership for the price of 10. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's become a platitude to say anything about the pace of change, right? You hear so often people saying, oh, it's just one thing after another. Like, when am I going to get a break? And it's real and it's true and we all feel it, but we're not going to get a break. That's the reality that we have to accept and we have to plan for and be ready for. Now, that doesn't mean we can't take a break and we shouldn't step back and do what we need to do for our own self-care. But even that act, it's not a one and done. That's restoration we need to figure out how to do

continuously over the course of our career is the changes are going to keep coming and they're going to keep coming faster than they even are today. So how do you get through each day, let alone build a meaningful, connected and rewarding career when rapid fire, constant change, groundlessness, unrelenting pace, overwhelm, and even workplace toxicity have seemingly become more and more the norm? Well, that's where we're headed with my guest today, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, an author, entrepreneur, startup executive, and Harvard-trained physician with expertise in behavioral and organizational change, digital health, well-being, and AI. Gabriella began her career in psychiatry and fMRI research, looking at people's brains. And she's the founding CEO of the healthcare technology company,

Lifelink, and has served as chief product officer and chief innovation officer at BetterUp, a transformation platform for global professionals and is head of BetterUp Labs. In her new book, Tomorrow Mind, which was co-authored by renowned psychologist Martin Seligman, also known as the father of positive psychology, she offers critical insights for facing a wildly fluctuating, seemingly perpetually unstable and challenging future of work. And in our conversation today, we explore a bit of Gabriella's background, her own trajectory in her career before diving into five science-backed strategies or workplace superpowers that can help us all thrive at work

from resilience to building rapid rapport. There's just a lot of great insight to learn here. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I am deeply fascinated by both the work that you're doing around wellness in the workplace and also your own personal career trajectory. You started at Harvard, you end up at Mount Sinai, New York. In med school, you come out of there, you're at UCSD in Southern California, doing a residency. And it seems like psychiatry and the way that the brain works is a real deep fascination. It becomes really the center of so much of the work that you're

doing in the medical field for her. From my understanding, it's the better part of a decade. Then you make this really interesting change. Medicine is one of these fields that a lot of people don't walk away from. So when I meet somebody who did, I want to know what happened. It was the only time in my career that I lacked something without being pulled toward something else. I knew that it was not right. And I'll tell you why, but I didn't know what I was going to. And that it was terrifying for all the reasons you can imagine, financial, it was a major identity shift. So I had gone into medicine to be a psychiatrist. And the reason was that I was fascinated with the brain. Intellectually, I remained captivated. I think it's a frontier of knowledge is knowledge

of knowledge itself, what could be more worthwhile. And then on the emotional side, from a pretty young age, I knew that I wanted to help people with psychological well-being and emotional suffering. It bothered me. Then it bothers me now that we have all of this science that's let us live longer and all of this technology that has improved the standard of living, but our lived experience arguably has not moved in terms of our well-being and our happiness since we evolved. And so that is to me the challenge, the problem. And psychiatry was my first guess at where to work on that. I had a lot of inputs leading to that.

And when I got to the point of doing what I would do for the rest of my career, clinical practice and psychiatry and academic research, studying the brain with fMRI, I just hit this wall of there's not enough innovation happening here. And I'm really worried for my own well-being about what's going to happen to me if I stay. I didn't know where else to go. And the truth is that leaving medicine is not as terrifying as it sounds because you can always go back. You know, I had enough training, had my license. There is a path back. But when I knew deep inside myself that if I did have to go back, it wouldn't be because I wanted to, it would be because I couldn't find the thing. That was pretty terrifying. It took me a long time to find the tech sector. I did a lot of experimentation and all of these signals started pointing me there. So I was doing some journalism, trying to follow the news stories

on where exciting things happening around well-being. It was leading me to tech. I was doing some consulting work for different companies. All of the exciting and innovative things they were doing was related to tech. And even as I kept up my clinical work, I shifted over to a county mental health facility, which I loved working with that population. they were under a major budget crunch. And the way that they solved for that, they had to shut down a lot of their satellite mental health clinics, was they hooked up this crazy, awkward telemedicine situation with like a cubicle TV and, you know, a tangle of wires. But that was how we gave access to care to hundreds, if not thousands

of people all around the county who no longer had local places to go. So all of that for me was this light bulb moment around, okay, this is, there's a huge opportunity here to really innovate with these tools. It was starting to happen in health in general, but not yet in behavioral health, but I could see how quick and easy that would be to translate into my space. And that was it. You say that was it as if, and then we were off to the races, we're humming along. It was just fairly straightforward after that, which it never is. And the fact that you also, as you shared, when you sort of like said, okay, it's time for me to make a transition, it wasn't clear. You didn't have something lined up where you say like, okay, so I've got my income covered. I've got like, you know, whatever attachment to status and like whatever I built in the

past, like cover and I'm making this, you know, I feel psychologically and financially covered and secure, which so many people seek to do. Although arguably over the last two years, that hasn't been the case. But to make that leap is, it's a big leap. And the fact that it sounds like your approach was, let me run a series of experiments because I sense what's wrong, but I don't have a really good grip on how to do or be a part of something that would fix what's wrong. So let me just try a whole bunch of different things. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I did and still do have an amazingly supportive husband. So having a partner who was bringing in an income gave me more financial freedom than I think many others have and a tremendous amount of empathy for that. By the time you get to be

a practicing clinician, you have a lot more skills than you realize, right? You've gotten a basic grounding in professionalism and decent communicator. So there's plenty of other things you can do. It may not be as lucrative as medicine, but I found quickly there were ways that I could bring in income as I was experimenting that helps me feel more permission to keep experimenting and keep searching and keep looking. I think that's actually one of the greatest things about the gig economy today is it gives people something to lean on while they're searching and finding and following. And for some of us, that's not, we don't find that purpose in our career. We find it elsewhere. And so again, that gives you a lot more flexibility to pursue that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It also sounds like you made an interesting choice even within the practice of medicine. A lot of psychiatry these days has become psychopharmacology, where there's sort of like a bit of an initial touch and go assessment to figure out like, what is the right, you know, like blend of meds that we're going to try. And then it's more of a, like, let's see how it's going and adjust along the way. And this is not a slight of like, for some people, medication is absolutely the appropriate path or at least part of the appropriate path. But it seems like over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, a huge amount of psychiatry has shifted over that. But even within psychiatry, it sounds like you are taking a different path.

Like you are much more interested in how does the brain work, what's happening and the behavioral change side of it. Yeah. You know, not directly related to like, let me sort of like be the primary psychopharmacologist in the relationship. To me, what's so exciting about the brain is how much we don't know. And every new discovery is enthralling to me. And it's almost a spiritual experience for me when you understand something new. Psychiatry, for lots of reasons, including the way insurance works, including our defensive medicine culture, it's much more focused on the little that we know and the tools that we have versus pushing the boundaries to improve those tools, to innovate. There are many extraordinarily creative, committed psychiatrists who I think could contribute tremendously to the innovation

that's needed, but their day-to-day, what they're reimbursed for doing is more of the same with the same set of drugs that hasn't really fundamentally shifted. Even as new drugs come out, and you read a lot today about psychedelics and the opportunity there, but just psychedelics as one example, not by any means as the be-all and end-all, it's very hard to access those new treatments because the system's not set up to accommodate these new innovations. And so you see smaller companies starting up to try to give people to deliver those new treatments to folks because it's not happening fast enough through the usual channels. Yeah. I mean, even with large-scale studies going on now, like Johns Hopkins and other major

institutions, it's still such a thin slice of what's possible. I completely agree. I'm curious too, when you spent a chunk of time doing fMRI studies of the brain, so effectively watching the brain in real time, what was the focus of those studies? What was driving you there? Yeah. So I used fMRI as a tool to study a lot of different things, but where my interests were coalescing was actually around the study of autism. So autism is obviously a condition that has increased in prevalence. We don't really understand why. A lot of the things that seem to not be optimally working in autism relate to broader questions

about how do we interact socially, about language development, things that are much deeper mysteries. To me, as part of that philosophy of if you study something that's not working as it's expected to, what can you learn about it fundamentally that can then inform the rest of the population? I remain active and involved in supporting parents of those with autism, the individuals themselves. I think it's an area of tremendous need. Also thrilled to see the ways that the world is starting to embrace neurodiversity and to have a mindset shift around what it means to have a different way of looking at things. I do think we'll continue to understand a lot more in particular about social dynamics as we get clearer on the process in the brain that results in what it is to live and be someone with autism.

Yeah. I feel there's been a sea change in the way that people are even, like you just said, like using different naming convention, different language around it, which words matter. It is exciting to see the shifting happen there. even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So as you sort of, you're running the experiments and you're trying on different things from journalism to tech, you become more deeper and deeper into tech. A large chunk of your time now has been spent with this organization, BetterUp Labs, which is saying, okay, let's look at behavioral change, behavioral design at scale, and especially in the context of the workplace. Tell me what drew you to this. Yeah. So I first met the founders of BetterUp when I was working at a company called Cast Light

Health. I was leading a behavioral health product at Cast Light Health. And it was one of the first, if not the first on the market that combined software with a virtually mediated therapy relationship to try to say, okay, how can we use these technologies combined with the human to help people grow? That product, like most of the products on the market that support our well-being, it has the word health in it. We think of it as related to either helping treat a mental health condition or maybe helping us avoid a mental health condition.

But it has the sense of almost remediation because of its categorization within healthcare. And also because the way that employers think about a product like that is as close to healthcare and it's really about limiting spend on medical costs. All of which meant that and continues to mean it's very hard to get people excited about a product like that. It's very hard to capture, you know, motivation, energy, especially from people who have ideas about themselves that don't mesh with the idea of working on your psychological well-being, right? And what the founders of ButterUp were coming and sharing with me was, hey, we have an opportunity to do this with a really different kind of a brand and energy.

It's much more aspirational. It's much more about performance. It's much more about achieving your goals than about, quote unquote, fixing something. And the reality is the work is very, very similar, whether you're doing it under the auspices of a behavioral health product or a professional coaching product. Great coaches will tell you so much of executive coaching is about emotional regulation. You know, all of this, of course. So to me, that was because I'd been trying so hard to crack the code on engagement with this product and get people to use it more. That was like a big aha of oh, it's like a complete frame shift, mindset shift, aspirational energy, align it with my career and where I want to go where I'm already feeling a ton of motivation. And that's why I got on board. I was an advisor for a couple of years first, and then I joined on full-time as an employee in 2017.

Yeah. And I mean, it is so interesting how people will devote time, energy, and resources to doing something when their brains can kind of make an apples for apples comparison and say like, if I do X, Y, and Z, there's a high likelihood that will help me with this other thing that I can kind of measure and be rewarded for any like professional context. But if you told them or invited them to say yes and allocate the same, you know, like time, energy and resources, and then said, and the benefit will be, you know, like you'll feel more relaxed and resilient and calmer and healthier. And it's so much harder. You know, behavior change is, we are it had been like to live in a time

where religion was a larger influence and spirituality was a larger influence on people's lives because the express purpose was not to support well-being, but so much of religious communities can and often do support well-being. And so there are people who were devoting a lot of time to these practices for that reason versus today, you know, our motivations tend to be more about the self, more about our own ambitions. And so what was it about that area and that structure that brought that out in us and how can we elicit that same commitment? So much of that, and you're right, I think about this all the time too. It sounds like there'd probably be a whole separate conversation between us.

But I think it's fascinating because so much of that was people would literally build their entire lives, invest so much time and energy like you kind of knew that you were getting something out of it, but a really big part of it was being a meaningful and like conscious and intentional contributor to the larger whole. And I agree. I think so much of that has been lost over the last generation or two. And so many of the places that people would turn to for that feeling and that opportunity to contribute, they're not doing the same thing anymore. Robert Putnam wrote about this in Bullying Alone like years ago, sort of like the demise of the way that we gather and belonging along with it and all the needs that that satisfies. We become so individualistic and maybe that's actually helping us check boxes in our individual, you know, like go rising up the ladder thing. But I feel like we just, we spend so little time looking at like, what is the trade-off?

Yeah. Every model of wellbeing, every model of what puts you at risk for psychological illness, early death, it's all about connection, right? It's not only connection, but there's no model of well-being that doesn't include relationships, meaningful connection with others as a pillar. So it's certainly to our own detriment that we lose those communities and don't take the time to invest in value. I think the literature is really clear on it. How can we set ourselves up with lifestyles that are more conducive to that? I think it's something that we're not yet at a collective level of motivation around. Yeah, certainly. And the work that you have done, the work that you've done in collaboration with

Marty Seligman, and certainly the work that Marty's been doing for, I guess, since the early 90s now, has really helped, I think, so many people reimagine what actually is thriving, what is well-being. Even his early model, so many people shorthand as PERMA. And then the work that's been done after it, where people start to add one more thing, it's PERMA-V, and now it's PERMA plus four. And like, and even like that, the early ideas were starting to say, okay, so there are models of wellbeing, but this is like a dynamic framework, but let's keep investigating and challenging and kicking the tires and adding things to it. I feel like we do know so much more about like, what are those contributors to human flourishings these days? And yet still, it's not guiding a whole lot of decision-making and action-taking. I mean, that's part of the call to action for our book, to be honest, is to say we are at a tremendously important inflection point in the world of work.

It's a historic labor transformation we're going through. We know today that these labor transformations can be very harmful to our well-being as a species, and we have evidence from previous major labor transformations. Are we going to sit around and let the same thing happen, or are we going to make use of the science that exists? By no means is that science all done. There's lots more to do. But we have four solid decades of research on how to do this. And it's only been increasing exponentially in the latter, you know, last decade and a half in terms of the volume of studies. we have the data that we need to avoid those negative outcomes and also to use this as an opportunity to thrive, to achieve great things, to make these moments of change into moments of

opportunity. Like, what are we waiting for? Let's do it. So that's our call to arms with the book. Yeah, I love it. The workplace can be a source of great suffering, but also great expansion and abundance and thriving. You referenced the fact that work has become really challenging in a lot of ways. And I feel like the last couple of years have certainly, it's interesting, I think a lot of people feel like it's made it a lot more challenging. But what I see, it's just made a lot of the problems that have been there for a really long time that much more apparent to so many.

And then it surfaced them on a level where people are saying, I actually have to deal with this. Been this longstanding big mismatch that you write about and you talk about between the way that we're wired to handle the challenges of work and the way that work is actually challenging us. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on here. Yeah. So we break it down in terms of the work context into both the pace of change and the type of change. They're unprecedented. We've never experienced anything like it before. It's become a platitude to say anything about the pace of change, right? There's a very big difference between being able to intellectually recite the fact that there is a rapid pace of change around us and to internalize that to the point that

you are planning your life to account for that. You're planning your own developmental path to be prepared for that. You hear so often people saying, oh, it's just one thing after another. Like, when am I going to get a break? And it's real and it's true. And we all feel it, but we're not going to get a break. That's the reality that we have to accept and we have to plan for and be ready for. Now, that doesn't mean we can't take a break, and we shouldn't step back and do what we need to do for our own self-care. But even that act, it's not a one and done. That's restoration we need to figure out how to do continuously over the course of our career, is the changes are going to keep coming, and they're going to keep

coming faster than they even are today. So the pace of change is one, and then the nature of change, which is highly uncertain, complex, you know, the acronym VUCA is a great description for this. It's very hard to see where it's coming from, and it's very hard to see what are all of the ways that it's going to unfold and affect us for better and for worse. And so it challenges our ability, our desire to kind of see ahead, which we call prospection. And that's one of the areas, one of the five skills that we recommend investing in developing in order to help us restore a sense of agency in this era and to return to a feeling, a greater feeling of empowerment at a time where we are constantly at risk of

feeling victimized by everything happened around us. Yeah. So you use the acronym VUCA, which is shorthand, it's the letters of V-U-C-A for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. My understanding is that term actually originally, I believe, came out in military and now has been used a lot to describe the world of work and the world of trying to survive life and organization and a corporation because it's the air that breathes so many companies. And like we were saying, this is not a new experience. It's been there for a long time and it's been getting worse. You call out the pace of change, which often just exacerbates this.

I wonder whether the last couple of years have really brought this to the surface so much because the stakes feel like they became life or death. And they literally did become life or death for many people. And they also became, you know, in the blink of an eye, my entire career could vanish. And we had to face sort of like the compression of what had been happening for a couple of decades in a really short period of time. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, question is, is it going to, quote unquote, go back to normal or is this the new normal? And I think more likely than not, this is the new normal. The pace is and adjust to that. And in the meantime, there's, you know, a third black swan that comes out of nowhere. And, you know, it's the global nature of our economy and the rapid pace of technology's development and evolution. It makes these things hit us so

fast all at once. It's not like it's contained to one part of the world that has a chance to adjust and the rest of us have a chance to prepare. It's, you know, it's out of Wuhan before we even know it existed. And now we're all dealing with the reality of the fact that this probably is the new normal or abnormal. It's like abnormal is normal. Like now, there is no going back. I think we've all kind of come to that place and sort of like, if this is the future, if this pace and this level of disruption is just the way things are, what do we do with that? You know? And I think that's a lot of what you're talking about here almost, and using the context of work as this

container that says like, we can do everything in the name of improving this experience. And it's also going to have this astonishing ripple effect back into just how you live as a human being. A hundred percent. Yeah. And as we try to make really clear in the book, if we do this correctly, it has a payoff, obviously, for ourselves, our careers. That means it's better for our organizations. And so that's where our organizations can become allies in investing in helping us build these skills and, you know, in the tools that will help us to do that because it's

in our mutual interest. And that's been one of the best parts for me of partnering with large organizations to develop these tools over time is realizing that if we can align the incentives and we can, as long as we scope things correctly and are very clear about what we're trying to accomplish at any given moment, innovation can happen so much more rapidly. And we can dramatically increase access to critical services by way of the employer umbrella. Yeah. And I mean, I feel like employees are demanding this from employers now in a way that they haven't in a long time. I feel like a lot of employers, at least for the moment, feel like they have so much more power and agency in the relationship than they may have ever felt that they had, that they can then look at the organization and say, we actually need you to care about us

as much, if not more, as the bottom line. So even if leadership doesn't actually want to employ, they're realizing that if they don't, if they don't actually allocate resources to the things that would be evidence of caring about the human beings who make the existence of the organization possible, people are just walking out the door. So it has become life or death for the organizations and leadership too. And some of them I think are doing it because they really do care and they really buy into like this shift. And some of them, even if they don't buy into it, are realizing that they likely won't be around for a whole lot longer if they don't come along for this ride too. No, you can't compete. The employees are no longer

looking for compensation as the be all and the end all, you know, certainly career advancement, but really it's much more about growth than any particular linear path. We want and need to feel like we are developing as humans, as professionals. That can mean a lot of things if we don't have a path for that. At our employer, it's going to be very easy for us to jump ship. Meaning and purpose. We are expecting to have a sense of alignment of values with our employer. It doesn't necessarily have to be a mission-driven company, but the way that business gets done, the way that we treat each other, the way we treat our customers, we need to feel values aligned to feel good

about getting up and going to work every day. And there's a lot of options for people who don't feel that way. You know, there's a lot of opportunities to do short-term work, to bridge gaps between employers. Doesn't mean it's easy or inconsequential to move from one place to another, but it's a much more fluid labor market than ever before. And we know tenures are just naturally so short these days that it's harder than ever to retain someone, especially a really high potential, high talent individual who's going to have lots of opportunities. Those are the folks you're going to want to retain. And those are going to be the ones who have the most at their fingertips in terms of what the market's offering them.

Yeah. So let's go a little bit deeper into meaning because it's one of these five sort of signposts or psychological superpowers or things to focus on where you sort of say, you know, to really prepare yourself to thrive and to tap business and the workplace and, you know, like your job, your career as an engine to not just rewire how organizations function and let them thrive, but help individuals thrive. There are these five key things that we need to focus on, and meaning is one of them. And it's interesting to me because we're having this conversation, you know, heading into 2023. Studs Terkel, right, you know, comes out with working, I think, in the mid-70s, 74 or something like that.

Like it says clear as day, you know, it's not just about daily bread. It's about daily meaning. This is not a new thing. An existential crisis, the classic midlife crisis, it's not a crisis of money, status, power, or stuff. It's a crisis of meaning. Why are we still here? Yeah. Why haven't we figured this out yet? Is that the question? Yeah. No, and I think it's really important to recognize that it's not as if we never wanted meaning from our jobs before. I think that what we're seeing more and more today is it's a more explicit part of what employees are coming to the table looking for.

And it's a more explicit part of the way employers are evaluating employees is are they aligned to our mission, our values, much more than do they have the hard skills we need on paper to get us there. One of the challenges, so meaning and purpose is something that I and BetterUp Labs have been studying for a long time now. What does it mean to have meaning and purpose? How do we find it? What are the dimensions of it? One of the questions I get all the time from large organizations is, is it even possible to make someone's job more meaningful for them? Isn't that something that happens in the interior? And also, for some people, it's so close to spirituality that it feels a little funny to think about, quote unquote,

interfering in that part of their life. And so for that reason, Marty and I prefer the term mattering. And that's something we talk a lot about in the book. And so think of mattering as the part of meaning that's actionable, that's highly concrete. Rebecca Goldstein says that our need to matter is one of the reasons that we think of that as the reason for our existence, right? You need to feel like me being on this podcast matters. You know, I need to feel like me cooking dinner for my kids matters. It's such a difficult thing in today's world of work where we work on something for six months.

Suddenly the market changes. We have to put it aside and work on something for six months, suddenly the market changes, we have to put it aside and work on something completely new. So often we're walking away from large bodies of work that just we didn't never got to act on because things change too quickly. And it is also something where the manager is essential to create that sense of mattering for the individual. And I think that it's very fair and appropriate. We can agree that an individual has the right to feel from their supervisor that their work matters to them and to help them understand why their work matters to be done at all. Otherwise, we may as well be monkeys on a typewriter trying to create Shakespeare. So that is a skill ultimately

that managers actually need to get really good at is helping to help the individual understand why are you doing this? Why is it important for the organization? Why is it important for your colleagues and these other teams around you? And if you do have to stop and you may in fact have to stop on a dime to be able to tell you why we're stopping, what good is still going to have come out of the work that you did, whether it's your own development, whether it's pieces of that work we can come back to. Why does that work still matter, even though we need to change tack so quickly? That's one of the skills that we think modern managers need to get really, really good at. It's not something anyone's teaching them right now.

It's also not something all managers have an appetite for. And so part of what needs to happen around management today is the role the managers changed dramatically. It needs to be made clear. What does it mean to take on the role of leading a team? What does it mean to take on having people report to you? You're not pushing paper. You're not telling people,

here's your job, then you do this next. There's really a much more holistic role. And you have a huge impact on that individual's well-being. And if that's not something that you feel motivated by or inspired by, there's got to be other ways to grow your career than to manage people. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And the realization that in today's workforce, it is such a common experience to be working on something as a team and then the economy changes, the internal priorities change, the resources change, you lose a client, whatever it may be. And you wake up in it, you show up at work the next day and it's like, oh, that's over. And now we're going to be going in this direction. And the point you make about people in any kind of leadership position, understanding the importance of having a

conversation around that moment, rather than just saying, okay, this is done, here's the new thing, is so important. And just from navigating or from trying to tell the story of the continuity of mattering across things that are perpetually changing, which also might not be an easy or even a true story to tell, no matter how skilled the manager may be at trying to figure out, at understanding how important it is to be able to share that narrative. But I wonder if the reality on the ground in organizations is a lot of times it really didn't matter and there is going to be no continuity of that effort. I mean, you've been so much deeper into that than I have. What's your take on that? If we don't feel that our efforts are going toward some productive

outlet, we're not going to want to keep doing the work, right? If we have the opportunity to move to a different place, we will. It creates a retention risk. And I think that lots of times in very good faith, we take something on and then there is this dramatic shift away from it. And it's hard to say, okay, I was building product A, but now we're going to market with product B, product A is on the shelf. Why does product A matter? I still think that there are ways that that work matters to any organization.

And if it doesn't, there may be a lack of integration across the organization. So for example, even just through the lens of an individual employee's development, when they're working on product A, they should have been growing in some way in their skills and their abilities to communicate, to navigate ambiguity, complexity, whatever it would be. You know, each task you take on should be an opportunity for growth. Ideally, a manager is able to recognize that, witness it, honor it. Say, you know, we had to put that product on the shelf, but you picked up this skill that's now going to let you take on this other thing.

I've been working in products for many years now. It's very, very common that the products on the shelf get recycled in various ways. Ideas get brought back in. You know, even if you don't know for sure that that's going to happen, you can say in good faith that that's likely if you're working in an organization where ideas are shared. Even if it gets referenced as a point of learning for the organization, there's still a sense of mattering there. If we don't feel that, we risk being demotivated. It creates much greater risk of burnout for us to not have that essential why, fueling effort after effort. You also need to have a sense of trust and good faith from your manager to kind of buy into those stories. But really, we're looking for recognition. We're looking to feel that someone saw that we worked hard. Someone saw that we did high quality work. Even if it doesn't get out to the market because something changed in the macro climate, that's meaningful to feel seen and recognized and it helps with our sense of achievement. made a really, I think, nuanced but important distinction between you can get this feeling of,

okay, so this, the six months I just devoted to this really mattered. I think on the surface, you could say, well, like the project that I was working on or the product I was working on, like that thing, I believed in it. And that's why it mattered to me. And you could anchor like that sense around that. But if there isn't also like the broader understanding of saying, well, and like, yes, and, you know, it was also an incredible experience for you to grow and learn new skills and context and, and solve really cool, interesting new problems and learn a whole different methodology of how to solve problems and learn how to work better with other people. And if that's not, I feel like it's harder for a manager or a leader to tell that story at the end of the cycle, rather than to understand that that's something that needs to be communicated on an ongoing basis. And then if something ends, it's much easier to say, okay, so I get it. And it's a bit of a bummer, but you know, I've understood all along, there's just a whole bunch of other things that are making me feel like, like this

matters and I matter. Totally. And I think that's also part of why opportunities for growth and become such an important part of what employees are looking for and what organizations need to provide, because they cannot guarantee that, you know, your sales region is going to stay your sales region for your tenure, but they should be able to guarantee you that you will continue to have opportunities to grow as a salesperson, whatever region you're in, whatever customers you're working with, whatever product you're selling. You know, it may not be every single day there's some dramatic growth opportunity, but on the whole, that's's the orientation and that becomes its own very deep and important and sustaining source of mattering yeah no that makes so much sense to me

mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun january 24th tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

One of the other of those five factors that you talk about is you describe as rapid rapport. And it kind of relates back to something that you shared earlier in the conversation, which is the importance of people, the importance of relationships and feeling connected. It's interesting the way that you tee this up, though, as it's not about just the importance of people in connection. There's like the notion of rapid rapport. What's going on here that makes rapid rapport critically important? On the one hand, we need each other as much as we ever have. We need each other to feel whole, to feel well, to feel like our authentic selves. We also need each other at work. The work that

needs to be done requires innovation across lots of contributors, requires global collaboration. There are very few forms of work you can be good at today without effective collaboration. And yet, there are significant barriers to connection defined by our world of work. So the first that we offer is time. We have feel anyway, like we have less and less time for each other. We're busier and busier. All these people sit at their desk to eat lunch by themselves. The second factor after time is space. So we feel this sense of divide because we're geographically divided. We're working remotely. We are asynchronously slacking with each other instead of talking to each other live. And then the third barrier is what we call us-them.

That's the language of neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky. But it's the way that our brain divides between people who are in us and people who are them. And that happens across so many dimensions that we're not even aware of. Obviously things like race and ethnicity, but also things like what function you're a part of. Are you on marketing or are you on sales? That's an ask them distinction. By company, are you in our rival company? Are you in our company? Geography, culture, language, so many dimensions of difference. And as opposed to the way the context in which we evolved, where everyone close to us wasn't us, more or less, we're constantly around people that our brain is

registering as a them. And in order to connect, we need to overcome these three barriers. And we call it rapid rapport because time is in so many ways the defining feature. We need to overcome these three barriers. And we call it rapid rapport because time is in so many ways the defining feature. We need to quickly overcome these. We're forming new teams. The teams disband three months later, reconstitute across continents and functions, etc. But our teams and our work cannot be optimal if we're not connected and we don't have some baseline of trust. So how do you quickly establish that trust despite the fact that we're limited in time, despite the fact that you're divided in space, and despite the fact that we're processing most of the people we work with automatically as a then rather than an us?

That's the big question, right? It's interesting. Your team is up in the context of teams and organizations, but this is also a problem of life. This is how many people say that they feel isolated, disconnected. They don't feel like they have a single close friend that they can talk to, or the people that they would tell you are their closest people they actually haven't talked to in months. And if you ask them why, they're like, all these reasons that you just shared, just on a very personal level. I just don't have time. Things are moving too quickly. We can't coordinate. We had a couple of years back, somebody guest on the podcast, he's a friend and an amazing person, Kat Velos is a UX designer. And she looked at this, she said, let me approach the problem of friendship as a user experience design problem. And it's fascinating. And she coined this term hydroponic friendship.

Because she said, just like you're saying, she's like, we don't have the time to let things unfold and like the way that we used to, you know, and it takes an average of, I think she said four to six conversations or connections or lunch dates or whatever it is to start to really feel like you're forming a friendship. And we don't have time to do that. And life is too complicated. And certainly over the last couple of years. So she sort of like, you know, like develop this approach to like effectively be able to, you know, seed and grow a friendship in a fraction of the time. And she's talking about it on a very personal level. And you're talking about effectively the same thing, but at scale within organizations. And it's not just, it's a deeply personal human

need to feel connected. And at the same time, there's a huge impact on the 8, 10, 12, 16 hours a day that so many of us spend doing that thing called work now too. I love that term, hydroponic friendship. That's brilliant. Isn't it awesome? It's great. And it's absolutely true outside of work as well. I think what work spins up even more intensely is first the geographic piece and then the piece of just changing teams all the time. At least outside of work, after a few months, you can come back to a friendship and keep coming back to the friendship. Sometimes at work, you need to get to that place of trust and be working with a team you just met

on some high priority initiative that's due, you know, the milestones are due in three days. So getting to that place where you can trust each other to get to the output that comes out of high trusting collaborative relationships is part of what we're trying to help people with. The big question, of course, and you're like, how? Yeah. What are some of the big mechanisms that you've seen be really effective with this? Yeah. So I'll start with time and then we can see if we want to continue through the other barriers. So time, we feel short on time all the time. We're always trying to multitask and kind of dilute ourselves into thinking we can get more out of the moments. We offered two strategies on time. The first is there's a really fascinating study

done by a brilliant group of psychologists called Giving Time Gives You Time. What they did was they looked at a group of people, all of whom had a sense of time pressure. They basically gave them time back in their day, and they told them that this time that was back in their day, they could use it in any one of four ways. One was do nothing, do something for yourself. One was do something kind for others. And I forget now what the fourth one was. But of all of the conditions they tested, the only one that actually made people feel like they had more time in their day was doing something for others.

And so the lesson here is that the more starved we feel for time, the more we can benefit from giving even a small amount of that time to others. It will give us a sense of time abundance instead of time famine to do kind acts for others. So think of something small that you can do, do it, and then savor and enjoy the sense of time abundance that results. You need to process that cognitively to really then help yourself unlearn this habit of, I just don't have time to do something nice for someone or to be connected to someone. The other piece around time that's fascinating is we really overestimate how long it takes to have a meaningful connection

with someone. And this has been studied best back in the world of medicine. So doctors are arguably among the professionals who are most starved for time. They have 15 minutes that they're reimbursed for for each patient. Some of those patient interactions are extremely intense. They're giving bad news. How do you do that in that time constraints? And so these studies have been done around what do doctors need to say? How long does it actually take to establish connection and alleviate anxiety for the patient? And also, by the way, get to a better medical outcome long term. And so dozens of studies have looked at this, and it's less than a minute.

It's less than a minute of what you have to say, words of compassion, words of kindness, words of care to help that person feel connected to you and to help get to a better outcome. So just think of that for yourself and your team. Think about taking 45 seconds even at the end of the meeting, words of encouragement, words of connection, word together. It takes so little time. It will give you a longer sense of time in your day, that sense of time abundance, and it will meaningfully connect you to that individual, even if it seems hard to believe. So we try to go through a lot of that data in detail to help reframe this idea of what it actually takes to get there. Shane that you bring medicine into it too, because you think about, yeah, like talk about rapid fire. You need to actually develop rapport really quickly, especially because some, some of those conversations are not going to be easy or necessarily happy ones for the patient. And somehow you've got to have it. It's interesting too, because if I have this right, I remember,

I think you were given the gold award. Arnold Gold was somebody who introduced this idea of rehumanizing medicine decades ago and teaching young physicians actually developing, even if it's short, developing that relationship was so important. So it's interesting to see that carry through your narrative and then also the broad understanding of how do we actually bring this to scale to organizations and to industry so that it has that same effect of just making people feel like they can be connected again both to each other and to their own humanity. Thank you for saying that. I feel so seen that you made that connection. And I think it also, to go back to that part of our conversation, one of the biggest challenges is that these incentive structures in medicine are in many ways dehumanizing the interactions between patients and providers. And how do we fix that

problem? I think that's one of the crises in healthcare today. Yeah. And one that I don't think there's any solution to, but I think on's one of the crises in healthcare today. Yeah. And one that I don't think there's an easy solution to, but I think on the one hand, it's really complicated. On the other hand, it's really simple. Yeah. But like, yeah, it's an interesting moment, I think, for medicine in particular around these ideas. I actually think part of it is selection.

It's what are the criteria to become a doctor? Are we valuing enough those humanistic skills and putting the right emphasis on it? Think about it as a talent challenge. You got to start with selection. So those were some tips around how to overcome the time barrier, the space barrier, and the ask them barrier, their own challenges., we offer tips around those as well. Yeah, no, I love that. And there are so many other things in the book. One thing I do want to talk about is something you referenced earlier also, because I feel like it's kind of the centerpiece to a certain extent. And tell me if I actually got this right into like the five really important things to focus on. And it's this word you used earlier, which is prospection, which is fascinating for me because I'm somebody who, if I understand it correctly, this is effectively sort of like really being able to

spend time looking forward and thinking about and pondering and anticipating what might be coming, what it might look like, how I as an individual might respond to that or prepare myself for, or literally bring it into reality or larger scale as an organization, how we might respond to that or prepare myself for, or literally bring it into reality or larger scale as an organization, how we might respond to it. I'm somebody who has been literally pathologically prospective as a human being to the point where I have uttered the phrase so many times in my life, I was like a decade too early and not in a good way. You know, it's like, ah, if only I had sort of like, like sat on this idea for a decade, like it wasn't time, like the time wasn't right.

And then you have, you know, in the literature, you know, one of the earliest books in the happiness movement, Dan Gilbert comes out with stumbling on happiness. And a lot of the book is about this thing he called effective forecasting. And he's saying how utterly awful we are as human beings at trying to see what's coming and accurately predict them, even just in our own individual lives and understand how we might feel if something happened. So talk to me more about prospection. Why is this so important? And are we good at it or not? Yeah. So prospection is imagining and planning for the future. And are we good at it or not? Yeah. So, prospection is imagining and planning for the future. And are we good at it or not depends on who you're comparing us to.

We're the only species that can really do it, you know, at the level that we're talking about. So, in that sense, we're really good at it. Our world is very challenging to prospect about for all the reasons we talked about. It's a VUCA world. One of the definitions is, you know, it's volatile, it's uncertain. All of that amounts to unpredictability. We know that you can get better at prospection. And actually, you know, one of the data sets we use most often is our coaching data set.

Look at hundreds of thousands of people who have gone through coaching. What do they grow at? How? Over what timeframe? Perspective is the thing that they grow at most quickly, most consistently. It's pretty dramatic. Oh, interesting. And so one of the myths we're trying to break down is that you can actually grow better at perspective. And part of it requires understanding what does prospection look like in the brain? Where does it happen? How does it happen? And how can we get more precise in addressing the parts of our own prospection that are working really well versus the ones where we have areas of opportunity? So for example, we break down, prospection happens in two phases. So you're

thinking about the future, thinking about what's my next job opportunity. The first phase is going to be really fast, really optimistic, excited, divergent. And then after a few seconds to minutes, depending on who you are, suddenly the reality hits and it's much more evaluative and deliberate and a bit more pessimistic. Both of those phases are really important for effective prospection. Some people need help in the first phase. Some people need help in the second phase. The kinds of help we need in each phase are different. And so there's lots of ways to improve at that. What you started with, by the way, around being ahead of your time, that I would categorize as a problem of distal innovation. So I get that.

I think that's, yeah, that's certainly, you know, innovation of that kind is the kind of prospection. And I think there's different strategies for how to bridge from here to there so you don't miss that market opportunity. It's interesting because you also, when you describe this early, the two-phase model of prospection, how you can literally like figure out like, where do I need a bit of help? Where do I need skills? And kind of like focus in and train those two phases. You also use the word, when you're talking about phase one, divergent. When I first read you describing the two-phase model, I'm like, this sounds a whole lot like one of the central models of creativity around divergent and convergent thinking. And then there's this overlap with Kahneman system one and system two, which, you know, you talk about more when you, when you talk about creativity and innovation and like salience and executive control was like all of these things

overlap in really interesting ways. And it's sort of like, these are all the places where the brain plays. You're not responding to current data. You're responding to what could be. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's a beautiful way to put it. I find the confluence of all of those models to be exciting and reassuring. And to me, it's pointing toward truth. And we haven't quite gotten there. We have a lot of different slices at it, but it, you know, we're all convalescing on the same idea. And I think it's also getting at something that has become more taboo to talk about in psychology over the last like 70 years or so, but a lot of creativity, there's all this evidence around non-conscious parts of creativity. And there's a sort of romantic idea that creativity comes from the quote unquote unconscious, which is not something you're allowed to say as a

psychologist anymore, but as an artist, you can say it. And yet we also have all of this great neuroscience data on the default mode network, which is sort of our daydreaming network. And yet we also have all of this great neuroscience data on the default mode network, which is sort of our daydreaming network. And that is not fully under conscious control. And so how do we optimize for a process that requires non-conscious contributions is part of what I find so fascinating about creativity. And as you know, in the book, we try to take some notes from the way that those who train people on sleep have approached the same kind of a challenge, which is to say, what are behavioral modifications you can do to set yourself up for the outcome of interest? In this case, in their case, sleep, in our case, creativity, how can you organize your life and

your lifestyle to position you better for the creative output you're seeking? Yeah. The overlap there is really interesting too. And it ties into the idea of how we experience time and time seems to be like the acceleration of the cycles and time just weaves through everything that we're talking about. And whether it's perspective or like accessing creativity and being innovative, you know, and you just brought it up, like so much of insight-based ideation, it doesn't come from analytical process. It comes when you actually work at it and then create the time to step away from it and just let your brain do what it needs to do. And it's like, you're walking

down like all the classic things, like in the shower or going for a walk, they've sustained for a reason. And when we make our lives so brittle from a time perspective, it's like, I often wonder what are we taking from an ideation and creativity and innovation and contribution level when we do that. And like, what are we taking from our own lives, from the joy of being creative? But what are we taking from society and from the world in terms of like, what could be had we actually slowed down a little bit rather than sped up? Totally, totally. And our devices are not helping us in this regard. Indeed. Two other things you talk about in the book, resilience. And we've kind of wandered our way into creativity and innovation also.

There's so much more and so much more how-to within also. Definitely encourage everybody to check it out. I will be moving through it and rereading a few times. But so enjoy just learning more. And I love how you're sort of taking the full sweep of your experience as somebody who cares about the human experience and really sort of like opening up, expanding and saying, what's the mechanism? Like what are the on-ramps available to change the human condition that would be most compelling for both people and massive organizations with incredible resources and ulterior motives to get behind all of these

really big, powerful ideas that might actually make us live better lives and actually walk through the day with more joy. And I am a huge fan of pulling any levers that we can to do that. So super excited to just keep deepening into your work. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Surround yourself with love. Thank you.

Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, I bet you'll also love the conversation we had with DJ Dajana Thank you. listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better. So we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.