High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 698: Good Awkward: Turning Cringe into Confidence with Henna Pryor, CSP, Keynote Speaker & TedX Speaker

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Henna Pryor, CSP, is an award-winning keynote speaker, workplace performance expert, and the author of Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. She’s been featured in major outlets like Forbes, Fast Company, and NBC, and her work helps leaders and teams reframe awkwardness as a superpower. She blends science, storytelling, and real-world strategies to help us step into the discomfort that fuels growth. In this episode, you will learn: How  “good” awkward moments—paired with deliberate discomfort and strategic micro stressors—can fuel growth, connection, and high performance. Henna shares insights from her Social Muscles research, revealing how avoiding awkwardness actually increases it, and why embracing it builds likability, trust, and resilience.  Henna offers practical ways to build your “social muscle,” reframe embarrassment, and turn cringe moments into leadership superpowers. You will also learn daily practices to adopt a “do it awkward—but do it anyway” mindset, along with lighthearted stories that show the power of leaning into discomfort. 🔹 HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE 🔹 Learn more about Henna Pryor and Her Study & Keynote Speaking🔹 Request a Free Mental Breakthrough Call with Dr. Cindra and/or her team🔹 Learn more about the Mentally Strong Institute Love the show? Rate and review the podcast—and you might hear your name on the next episode!  

Welcome to the high-performance mindset podcast, where we help you master your mindset to gain the high-performance edge. My name is Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and today on the high-performance mindset, I'm joined by someone I had the pleasure of meeting at the National Speaker Association, and let me tell you, the moment we connected, I knew she was dynamite. Her energy, insights, and humor instantly drew me in, and I couldn't wait to bring her brilliance to all of you. Hena Pryor is an award-winning keynote speaker, workplace performance expert, and the author of Good Awkward How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. She's been featured in major outlets like Forbes, Fast Company, and NBC, and her work helps leaders and teams reframe awkwardness as a superpower. She blends science, storytelling, and real-world strategies to help us step into the discomfort that fuels growth. In this episode, you will learn how good, awkward moments, paired with deliberate discomfort and strategic micro-stressers, can fuel growth connection and high performance.

Hena shares insights from her social muscles research, revealing how avoiding awkwardness actually increases it and why embracing it builds likeability, trust, and resilience. Hena offers practical ways to build your social muscle, reframe embarrassment, and turn cringe moments into leadership superpowers. You will also learn daily practices to adopt a do it awkward but do it anyway mindset, along with lighthearted stories that show the power of leaning into discomfort. All right, let's jump into my interview with Hena Pryor. You will love it.

Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I'm so excited to have Hena Pryor join us here today, the author of Good Awkward. And it's about how to embrace the embarrassing and celebrate the cringe to become. the bravest you. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thank you for having me. And Sandra and I got to spend a few live minutes together recently in Scottsdale, so it's fun to get to reconnect here again. Absolutely. You know, and there's so many things, Hannah, that I loved about your book. I love the illustrations, actually, and I love the color in it, and I love the stats. Today we're going to be talking about your study about

awkwardness so i can't wait to talk to you more about that and i also love just this idea because i think today what we're going to be talking about is really at the heart of it is authenticity and embracing who you are one of my favorite parts of this was at the end when you wrote the about author page and you shared this poem that you found in your phone courtesy of your 10 year old son and i want to read this to get started you and it's called the mom poem mom is amazing her Blazers are blazing. She takes Ruby on walks and did two TED Talks. She embraces the embarrassing and celebrates the cringe. She watches Schitts Creek, no actually binge. She's a global speaker and a thrill seeker. She's married to Ian and loves vacations, especially European. Oh my gosh,

how amazing is that? I cackled on it. I literally discovered my phone and I looked at my husband. I was like, this should be in the back of the book. And he's like, no, actually, it should be in the back of the book. And I was like, it's my book. I can do whatever I want. Actually, it will be in the back of the book. So he made that easy for me. It was perfect.

I love it. And I love that, you know, maybe my favorite part of this is like she embraces the embarrassing and celebrates the cringe. And like for your 10 year old to say that that's what you do, that is what you embody. Yeah. I love it. So let's get us started and just tell us what inspired you to write good awkward. was there like a single moment or a pattern that sparked this idea?

Yeah, there were a few things. So I wouldn't say one single moment, but let's say my entire childhood was the thing that sparked the idea. I'm first born of immigrant parents and all I wanted to do was fit in. I mean, Sandra, you can appreciate. I wanted to be Jennifer or Samantha or Jessica. And I'm like, why do I have this name that I keep having to correct? You know, my food smelled different.

My clothes were different. and I just felt awkward about it all. And I think it wasn't until I got to college that I really started to find my people, find my confidence, and all of that was feeling really good until I started my professional career. And what I discovered was that at every transition point, every inflection point, so opportunity to be on a new project, potential promotion, advocating for myself in a negotiation, every transition point, all of those little henna feelings. came roaring back. I was like, I thought you had this figure up, Penn. I thought we were good. And maybe the moment that I decided it needed to be a professional focus was our Queen Brunay Brown, who all hail we love her and we love everything she's done for the profession. But she would say at the end of her interviews, she started to develop a tagline, which was

stay awkward, brave, and kind. So you may have heard her say that. She'll say, stay awkward, brave, and kind. And I had a very visceral reaction in my body when she said that. I was like, okay, brave, yes, that's important. Stay kind. My parents drilled that one into me, sure. But stay awkward. Sis, I've been trying to get rid of this one my whole life. What are you talking about? And it just made me realize that there was not much lens on this particular emotion in the workplace. And I've tried to look for it. I tried to find the books on it. And what I was finding just wasn't speaking to the experience I felt like so many people in my shoes were having. And first it was a TEDx. Then it became.

a book became very clear people wanted to talk about this emotion yes absolutely and we can all we've all felt this way right and so define what the phrase good awkward means to you and how would you differentiate that from just like these cringe worthy like awkward moments or maybe it's the same yeah i'll actually i'll answer that question in reverse i have two teenagers and today it is playing and common vernacular for them to say oh my god that is so cringe mom that is so so cringe. And so I challenged them one day. I said, can you define what that means for me? When you say, oh, my gosh, somebody's doing something that's so cringe, essentially what they told me in their teenage words was someone is doing something that is outside of the social

norm. They are doing something that is slightly subverting a social expectation. We are human beings. If anyone is going to get anywhere in life, they are going to step in it. They are going to get it wrong and especially when they are trying to take a risk, right? Raise their hand, volunteer to be the speaker, to self-advocate, to look for that negotiation and their salary. Those moments, especially those moments of risk, awkwardness and quote unquote cringe, not knowing how it's going to go, getting it wrong, is nearly inevitable. So the idea of good awkward is looking at these moments, not as something to avoid because good luck, good luck. You're not going to be able to avoid it. Even the most confident people we know don't avoid it. Good awkward means

learning to embrace that emotion, understanding it a bit more, and working on your comeback rate. You're going to feel it. How quickly can you recover and see those moments as a good thing as an impetus for your future growth? I love it. And I think about, you know, why, and I have two teenage boys too, you know, and it's like, you get it. I get it. I totally get it. And I think about like what really holds us back? What holds them back from sometimes being awkward? What holds me back of, you know, what, what is the real barrier? And to me, it's, you know, the fear of what other people might think. Like, what is that acronym, FOPO, fear of other people's opinions? Yeah. You know, and it's like, that's what I think gets in the way of embracing awkwardness. What do you think

are the barriers from a mental standpoint that gets in our way? Yeah. So, you know, we can speak to the older research and the wisdom of, you know, the spotlight effect. We think people are paying much closer attention to us than they actually are. That came out of Tom Gilevish from Cornell. We've talked about that for a long time. We also know about the illusion of transparency, which is when we do feel embarrassed or we do have a flub, we think that everyone can see right through us. Like, oh, my, you know, my face is starting to feel hot. I'm starting to feel like an idiot, you know, top to bottom. Look, sometimes, you might turn red and someone can see that. But the illusion of transparency essentially says,

we think people can see all of that. Every bit of, you know, tingling in our fingers, every bit of mortification. Truthfully, they don't. And similar to the spotlight effect, they've already flipped it back onto themselves. They're like, oh, that sucked for them, but what about me now? Right. What am I going to say next? I'm waiting for my turn to flub up. That's more typically what happens. I would say in modern day terms, we live in a fishbowl. We are. We are are putting everything online. There's this whole, you know, perception of people live these curated filtered lives. And even when they are not doing that, there's now this term I heard faux authenticity. Okay. So like influencers are literally draping a dirty sock over their chair

to feel more approachable and authentic. We don't know how to be anymore, right? The organic just flubbing and, you know, blurring of everything out, it's just gotten into this really fuzzy, fuzzy, messy place. So I think it's very easy for us to think, well, other people seem to have this right. Other people seem to be articulate all the time. Other people, even when they do have an awkward moment, it doesn't seem to consume them like it does me. Maybe it did at one point, but they've worked on that comeback rate. And I think we need to treat embracing awkwardness and embarrassment like a skill that we can build,

like a muscle that we can strengthen and not a trait that we've either been blessed with, or cursed without. That's not actually how it works. I love, you know, there's so many parts in your book that I love. Did I put a tag by them or put little notes on here, by the way? And there was one quote that I liked right at the beginning and you said, awkwardness is an invitation to vulnerability. Tell us what that means and how can we actually practice vulnerability. Yeah, Brunay has done a beautiful job amongst other, you know, social scientists and psychologists. She's not the only one, but she's done a brilliant job bringing vulnerability to the mainstream. But what I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen, is it got so much attention for a while

that we started to see leaders or high-performing professionals practice, again, a faux vulnerability, which is, okay, this term is coming up a lot. Apparently, it's a really sexy skill for high performers to have. And so, you know, we're going to go through a layoff and I as a leader. and not having any change in my salary or position, and I'm going, oh, guys, this is really hard for me too. And we're like, no, Chad, you are fine. You are, you are just fine. It doesn't feel authentic. It doesn't feel real. And so the difference between awkwardness and vulnerability is really only on one front. They actually share three traits in common. They share uncertainty. So both

of these emotions live in uncertainty. They share risk. We're putting ourselves out there a bit. they share emotional exposure. So the big difference between awkwardness and vulnerability is that awkwardness is lower on the scale of emotional exposure. So if you get something wrong or you don't know the answer, you might feel awkward to say, you know, I don't know the answer to that. I wish I did. I hope that's okay with you. I'm going to come back to you later with the answer. Versus vulnerability might look like a bigger emotional disclosure around that situation. Oh, as a leader, I'm really feeling, you know, like there's a lot of attention on me. I'm really feeling embarrassed. I'm really feeling frustrated. Like I've lost your respect. You know, there's just a lot more

of an emotional conversation at stake. Not everyone is ready for that yet. That requires an enormous amount of emotional intelligence to have a conversation like that and have it feel right and have it land. So what I encourage is don't jump to vulnerability if you're not there yet. If it's not authentic to you, if you're not quite at that level, that's okay. Permission granted to take a step back. Just get better at embracing awkward moments, embarrassing missteps, blunders. Start there. Vulnerability will be ready for you later, but you don't have to start there.

I love it. And so how do you think we can actually practice embracing the awkward and embracing kind of what you just said, the blunders and the opportunities where we don't, it's not perfect for us? Yeah. Number one is, you know, do the mindset work ahead. I think you, all people can appreciate all of these big emotions. It is much a head and heart game. So first things first, do a little bit of a reverse engineering of how strong does this emotion show up for you?

What language are you using to describe it? So here's one little very specific tactical thing. Please do not describe yourself as an awkward person. There's no such thing as a factual. awkward person. It is an emotion and it is subjective. If you describe yourself as awkward, you are creating a limiting box of your own creation. What you're experiencing is I'm feeling awkward right now. I'm feeling awkward about presenting to the group. I'm feeling embarrassed about how that meeting went down. But it is a feeling. Move it away from a permanent trait

to being a temporary state. Because truthfully, it is not a permanent trait. It is subjective. So words matter, right? The language we choose, really identity precedes behavior change. So that's not your identity. Let's strike that from the record. And then just a little bit of a historical deep dive is a great starting point. I grew up, for example, in a South Asian culture where an expression I heard very often was lo, which translates to what will people say? What will people think? It's a culture that is very much in tune with what will the community have to say about this? Not how does this serve your growth or is this something that you want, but what will other people think? What will they say? And so I grew up with a very strong lens of what other people think about you and for you

matters, right? Going against social norms, tisk, tisk, which made it very hard for me to take risks. And so I had to really just think back to a lot of those stories and choose new ones very intentionally. And then part two, which we can go into more detail on, but part two is conditioning. We live in a world that is optimized for smoothness. If I don't want to talk to anybody today, I can order my lunch on DoorDash, I can get my groceries on Instacart. I've been married for almost 20 years, but I could swipe, you know, left or right or whatever if I wanted to have a date. You know, there is not a lot of reason to have to connect with people. And so there are little things we can do to practice building that muscle. I will have my teenage kids

call in a pizza order rather than ordering it online. Do they get frustrated? Mom, mom. Yes, they do. Of course they do. And you know what compliment I get regularly from adults? So, like, your kids are very good conversationalists. You look me in the eye. They're able to hold. They ask good questions because I'm not willing to wait for the high stakes moments. We have to be willing to practice in the small stakes moments. So can you build a conditioning practice in social situations so that the big negotiation isn't the first time you're dealing with uncertainty in a social setting. And it makes me think about a couple of things you're talking about. I like when you said like identifying awkwardness as an emotion. It makes me think of Susan David's work where she's like labeling your emotions, like your emotions are not who you are. You know, like I am feeling

awkward right now. I'm feeling. And then there's one part I want to follow up with that you just said about choosing your stories. And I think what times I'm thinking about times where I felt really awkward in my life. Like maybe I didn't belong or like actually, honestly, in my first NSA meeting, you know, the National Association is like, do I actually, you know, belong here? And it was really cool.

Like when we just met last week, you know, at the NSA conference, I was like, yeah, I'm a professional speaker. Like I belong here, right? But part of that is like my own doing that, you know, the first time, I was looking maybe for the ways I'm different to the ways that I'm the same as people, which I think sometimes can happen. We feel awkward. So tell us a bit more about stories. And, you know, I believe that we can tell a different story to a situation. And that

helps us use our mindset to be able to thrive. But tell us what you mean by choosing the stories in these awkward moments and how we can actually practice that. Sure. Yeah, my favorite framing actually comes from Dan McAdams out of Northwestern University. He refers to contamination stories and redemption stories. So let's just, for starters, so a contamination story, it contaminates your future behavior, meaning something doesn't go the way you hope, and the story you tell yourself is one that makes you, you know, less likely to want to do the thing or put yourself in the situation in the future. So let's give a very specific example. Let's say you stuck your foot in your mouth at NSA.

You know, here's another funny thing. We can, a lot of us easily will call ourselves an awkward person. Can you imagine if we assign the same noun to the emotion of embarrassing, or something that happened that was embarrassing? Can you imagine walking around, Sandra, thinking, I'm an embarrassment? Yeah, that would not be empowering at all. Would you let your friend walk around saying, I'm an embarrassment? And yet we sit here with, oh, my gosh, I was such an awkward person in that scenario.

So what is your story that you're telling you? yourself, if you had a misstep, a blunder, if the conversation didn't go quite like you hoped, what is the story? Is that I'm never going to meet somebody new again? Or can you choose a redemption story, which is, okay, that didn't go the way I planned, but I definitely learned something in the process. And I will use that as, you know, guidance for the future. Let me just give you one specific example from this last influence conference. I was in the hallway and a tall man shouted out, hey, you're Joanna. Littleman's friend. And I said, yes, I am. I said, you know, who are you? And he said, oh, my name is Ryan. And so we're just chit

chatting. And I see that he has a giant ring on his finger. And I was like, oh, what's that? And he's, oh, it's a baseball ring. It's a world series ring. So I'm looking at it. And I see, I don't know a ton about baseball, but I see the little socks. I'm like, oh, red socks ring? And he's like, yeah. And my next question, which I'm just dying and laughing at myself now was, oh, what did you do for them? And he stops. And he kind of looks at me like eyebrows through. He's like, I, I played. I was like, oh, oh, should I have assumed that, right? Like, it just was one of those moments from like, Hannah, you have 43 years old. You should know. Just that's like a basic thing, what that is, even if you're not like a sports person. But I could have let that mortify me. I would have, you know, walked away. But instead, again, I am someone who has worked on my comeback rate. And I was like, well, I guess you can tell that baseball is not my number one sport, right? Like, tell me more. That sounds very cool, right?

It's what kind of story are you telling yourself? And when I walked away, I made sure I had a little moment of self-talk that was, you know, it's a human moment. You're not expected to know everything about everything and you handled it well. Don't be afraid to ask questions like that again. And then I moved on from the experience. Otherwise, you can sit there and let the hooks start to sink in. You know, you don't want to carry that thing forward. And so we can always choose a better story.

I love it. And I love the example that you gave because, you know, it's just like such a real human moment. And sometimes if we really beat ourselves up in those moments, if you would have been like, gosh, and I should have known more about baseball, you're such an idiot. Then actually that that gets in the way of that connection. You know, and then it becomes even more awkward. And then you don't get that relationship that maybe could serve you later. So I love like the comeback rate and the self-talk that you gave yourself after. words, what are ways that we could increase that comeback rate or like what advice would you

give to the listeners on how can we do that even more quickly or effectively or efficiently? Sure. One of the easiest ways to improve your comeback rate, and it sounds like the most counterintuitive, is this truth, the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness. Nice. So when you're having an awkward moment and then you pretend like it didn't happen, it actually makes it worse. And so you'll notice that the people we deem confident are actually the ones who have a moment like that and immediately name it, immediately own it of, oh boy, that was awkward. Or, oh, I'm embarrassed. I feel like I should have known that. But they do it with a bit of a playfulness or a smile. Again, we're appropriate. This is contextual. If it's something that's a

little more severe, it could be a quick apology of, oh, that was uncomfortable and awkward. I'm going to walk that back and I'm going to do better. But it's the person who actually names that feeling out loud that immediately rehumanizes themselves and frankly pops that little balloon of tension that for a moment was hanging in the air. We feel so grateful to whoever does that first and we actually look at them as confident. So name it, name it quickly, get in the habit of naming it quickly. And then the second thing, and there's a whole chapter about this in the book,

is really finding strategic ways to use humor. That looks different for all sorts of people. Everyone's got their own ways of employing humor. My personal brand is strategic self-deprecation. So when I say strategic, please don't be self-deprecating about something that is supposed to be in your wheelhouse. So if I was a tax accountant and I made a significant tax error, it's not really helpful to say, well, wish I knew how to do taxes, right? Like, I'm supposed to know how to do taxes. That's not an ideal time. But if I trip over my own two feet while walking to get a glass of water, it's perfectly acceptable and very relatable and human to say, well, good thing I'm better at taxes than I am walking across this carpet, right? It's just a human moment that

everybody can relate to. And it immediately, again, puts everyone at ease. The thing about this emotion is everyone experiences it. Everyone can see themselves in it. So the sooner we can kind of address it, give a tiny bit of air time in the room, the sooner it dissolves into the night. But we just have to be the ones to do that out of the gate. And then I think when we embrace the awkward, it makes us so much more relatable, you know, think about just the ways that you're just engaging in self-deprecating here where it makes you just so much like, yeah, like I could hang out with her. I like her. Yeah. Think about celebrities. Even if they don't self-deprecate or, you know, even address the awkward moment,

think about this is going to sound so terrible. But how good we feel when we see a celebrity blunder? Why? Because we've put people on a pedestal. Yeah. They're so flawless. They're so perfect. They never get it wrong.

And so when they do, there's almost this sense of, oh, thank God. Like, oh, thank God, they are a human too. Right? People really do appreciate it. Hi, this is Cindera Campoff. And thanks for listening to the high performance. mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize and implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively

and get to your goals quicker. Visit free mental breakthrough call.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's free mental breakthrough call dot com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. You know, one of the things I want to talk, Hannah, about is your research study, which I absolutely love. It's called The Hidden Strength, Powering Workplace Performance, and Social Muscles. So tell us a little bit more about why you conducted the study and how does it relate to what we've talked about so far. Sure. So the book really focused on the emotion of, you know, awkwardness, of embarrassment, of cringe moments.

We really did a deep dive, I would say, at the individual level of that emotion. and what can we do to empower us to embrace it, use it as a force. I wanted to do a little bit more digging as to the what's creating this, right? What's the why? And what is the larger conversation that exists above it? So what we had discovered in the research and what we set out to look for is the role that our social muscles play in our performance and our success. So, you know, in the last few decades, we've done a lot of work around physical fitness, physical strength. We know that one pretty well. I know in your world and in some of our shared spaces, we do a lot of work around mental fitness, mental strength, mental muscle. But there is another

dimension, which is our social muscle, our social strength. And what we have discovered is that over the last few decades, we were starting to see an atrophy in our social muscles. So this was starting with technology. So I don't know about you, but I grew up in an era where if you wanted to meet somebody, you know, to date, you would approach them in a bar or I would be approached and somebody would ask for their number. When I wanted to talk to my friends on the phone, I would say, hi, Mr. Bromeyer, how are you? Is Kelly home? Right. There was a lot more of that dialogue that was just part of our culture, our structure. Technology took a lot of that away. Pandemic certainly accelerated and exacerbated what was already starting to occur. We were all of a sudden forced to be

remote. We were doing a lot of conversations electronically, asynchronously. We were not rubbing elbows or bumping each other at the water cooler. So a lot of that proximity and friction disappeared. Even before all of this, we know that social muscle can atrophy because astronauts, polar explorers, prisoners, people who are naturally isolated by virtue of their job or their situation, the researchers found that they would forget how to people when they came out of that situation, meaning they couldn't quite read other people's facial expressions. They couldn't catch the cues because they were out of practice. We all experienced that, all of us, extroverts, introverts, ambroverts when pandemic finally started to lift a bit.

Do you remember, Sandra, your first meeting in person? You were like, are we fist bumping? Are we getting close? I'm trying to read your face. I can't quite tell what your face is doing. we all got to experience that. And so increasingly with the structures that we found ourselves in, we are noticing that there has been a social muscle atrophy and there has been some downstream workplace consequences, which we can certainly discuss in detail. And leaders especially or people tasked with improving the performance of their teams need to put a little closer lens on this particular issue in order to get out from some of

the reverse that we need to do. Wonderful. Yes, I remember my first keynote, live keynote back after, it was so refreshing, but also people felt really awkward because they weren't sure, you know, what to do and how to interact with each other. Right. I liked the end of your book where you give the overview of social muscle, what it is, and then you give some of your data from your study. Was there anything particular from your study that really surprised you that you want to share with us that you think would be, Really helpful for the listeners. Sure.

I think two stats in particular I found staggering. So the one that gets quoted the most is one in three working Americans would rather clean a toilet than ask a coworker for help. Now, Al, but I say that and people are like, are you sure, Hannah? Are you sure? And then I had a chance to go on a segment in New York with Pix 11 News and they decided to run this as their own little study on the street. They took it out to the streets of New York and started, they asked the same question. Cinder, in their New York street study, half of the people, half, 50% said they would rather clean a toilet.

This is what we've gotten to as far as not wanting to reach out, the awkwardness, that inability to initiate a conversation when we aren't sure of the outcome. So that stat is staggering and I hope makes people sit up in their seat. The other one that I think is really important is that 50, 6,000. percent of employees in our study said that they would prefer to work alone rather than with coworkers, even though 84 percent believed in the value of their social structures to get them through adversity, challenge, and change. So the majority know how important it is to work together, especially during times of adversity, challenge, and change. And despite that,

56% of them would rather work alone. So there's a huge difference between what we know is right and what we know is best versus what we've gotten comfortable doing. I didn't put this in the study, but I honestly wish I did. I heard Derek Thompson write about this in a beautiful essay he wrote for the Atlantic. I do believe that we are dealing with loneliness at work, but I think it's less about that. I don't think that we are lonely at work. If we are lonely, then we go seek out company.

What Derek suggests, and I agree with, is we're very comfortable in our aloneness. we're comfortable there. So there is no impetus to change it. There's no reason, no activation to change it. And so that's the issue that we really need to think about right now. Super helpful. And yeah, I think I would rather ask for help than clean a toilet. Me too. Me too. I don't really want to clean the toilet. But yeah. So tell us a bit about from your study, what did you find in terms of like what we should do, right? If we know that it's important. for us to ask for help, but we're okay with our aloneness and we don't really want to ask for

help, but we know it's important. What advice would you give for people who are listening, who are already incredible leaders and, you know, some of the best, but they want to keep on growing and improving? Yeah. So at the individual level, I think we've sort of talked about some of the strategies from the book, which that will give you a whole blueprint for how to handle that. But at the leadership level, I think the best way to describe the advice is through a metaphor. When you think about work spaces, right? So remember when all of us worked in an office. Some of you might still go in five days a week, but the work spaces, you don't just throw a bunch of chairs in and go, okay, fingers crossed. Let's hope that everyone, you know, cooperates or talks to each other. No,

there's some general intention behind the design. Maybe there's some pods. Maybe there's some closed offices depending on what you need. Same thing if you think about any public space, a park, a coffee shop, a library. They think about the design of the space. We need to, we need to, think about the design of the space when it comes to our social structures and it doesn't always have to be physical space. So in the case of leaders, I would often say, how often do you carve out five minutes to do a micro-disagreement drill with your team? Or you purposely ask your team to choose sides of an issue, whether they agree with it or not, but we're just assigning sides and have them practice sparring on disagreement, maybe scheduling five minutes at the top of a meeting

to do a bad idea brainstorm. Okay. Unrealistic ideas only. Let's get crazy. Go. People are like, Hena, why would we do that? Well, number one, sometimes there's a good idea hidden in there. And if you're only doing realistic ideas, guess what? So is your competition. So there's that. But more importantly, number two, when you start with an exercise like that, again, just five minutes, what happens is people's guards come down. You make it okay to try something that's a bit nuts or avant-garde or unexpected. and research finds that every idea that follows is more creative, more generative, and more innovative because you front-loaded what it feels like to kind of have the crazy stuff out there without judgment. You're modeling it. You've created a little exercise that build psychological

safety instead of just talking about psychological safety. So today, more than ever, we need to create what are, you know, you can describe them as like virtual water cooler moments or these virtual spaces, but they require intention. They're not going to happen organically and naturally. Usually it's like, come on, let's talk about the updates. Time to go. Let's keep this meeting short. They require intention. So leaders, let's talk about that. How do we create some intentional spaces for these types of conversations? So helpful. And I know when you're on stage, you talk about how that like this secret weapon is being good awkward, right, for performance and for leadership. Say more about why you think being, you know, having this good awkwardness is part of performance and leadership.

What do you say about that? Yeah. So the research actually says that, you know, a lot of times leaders think, well, if I display discomfort or if I display embarrassment or awkwardness over an issue, it's going to make me appear incompetent or inept. So first things first, ineptitude and incompetence are not synonyms of awkwardness. They are two different things. Ineptitude or incompetence imply some sort of deficiency and skill. You are not inept or incompetent if you express that you feel a little awkward or embarrassed about something. Just make sure you, A, make that distinction. But B, what the research actually finds is that leaders who embody some of those characteristics out loud, kind of the, oof, I feel embarrassed or I feel, you know, a bit awkward

about this. They actually are perceived as more generous, more trustworthy, more kind, and more forgivable. And they hear that and they're like, what? How? How? think about it in this world of chat GPTed everything of filtered and curated everything your lack of perfection puts your people at ease and if you want them to talk to you if you want them to bring ideas to you if you want them to bring a mistake to you rather than sweeping it under the rug trust me you want them to be at ease you don't want them to be on edge and so increasingly leaders need to understand that a rigid you know kind of highly held posture of all things anymore is actually serving an opposite effect to the type of team culture that

many say that they want to create. I'm not saying or suggesting that you air all your dirty laundry all the time, right? There are some appropriate boundaries, but occasionally let your guard down. If you want people to be able to come to you with conflict, with ideas, with innovation, with suggestions, with blunders, it starts with modeling. And so I think there's a leadership paradigm shift that needs to happen there. And I think when you, when you model that, you also are relatable. You know, they're not like this perfect leader who has all the answers, which no one does, right? It's like, no, you're more relatable and likable and all the attributes you just said. One of the things I want to ask you about, Hannah, from your book is you talk about this idea of between like embarrassments

for someone or with someone. Tell us about the difference there and how that helps us take social risk. This was probably my favorite finding from the research that I had not heard before, which is there is a type of emotion or a type of a quality referred to as easily empathetically embarrassed. So someone can be high on their EEE. And essentially what that means is that some forms of embarrassment tick up as a correlation to empathy. So some people who are highly empathetic, meaning they really feel what other people are feeling, can also find themselves feeling deep, deep levels of secondhand embarrassment. So my daughter is this person, my 15-year-old. Because she's read my book, she'll literally say, Mom, I'm having secondhand embarrassment.

So she names it now. But essentially, when we see someone else blundering, so let's say, Thindra, you watch me on stage, and I brutally mispronounce someone's name. Now, again, I work hard to avoid that because I've had that happen in the fast redemption story. I'm going to work on that next time. So I brutally, but you know that their name is pronounced differently and you're like, oh my God, Hannah, you know, because maybe you're very high on this empathy and you feel yourself wanting to crawl under the desk. You're like, I cannot deal. You feel my social pain as though you watched me trip and fall, as though you saw my physical pain. Your same brain centers actually light up. Now, empathy is a good thing. I'm not.

here to engineer empathy out of a single soul. In fact, the world could use more of it. But there's just good awareness that when you're very high on this particular form of empathy, you might be feeling something that I'm not even feeling. So I didn't realize I said that person's name wrong. I'm going about my morning and maybe I'll be corrected later, but I'm not mortified and you are. So in that sense, you're not embarrassed with me. You are embarrassed for me, which is actually a very sneaky form of judgment. You're like, oh my God, she should be embarrassed. She should be mortified right now. You're projecting something on to me that in that moment doesn't exist, which when that happens, it's going to make it very, very hard for you yourself to take a similar risk. You're going to

now worry, I'm going to get up there and feel something similar. I'm going to get up there and screw something up. It becomes this cycle. And so it's just a really good quality in oneself to be aware of because it can be quietly harming your ability to take social risks yourself. I appreciate you saying that. I think I have a high empathy rate, meaning that's just like maybe something where I can really feel other people's emotions when they feel it. Like I'm really in tune with that. So it's really helpful just to be able to be aware, be aware of that when I feel embarrassment

for others, that it might be a little judgment of them or self. and then just to realize it's going to impact my social risks. Hannah, okay, a couple of questions before we do a fun rapid fire at the end. Tell us how we can find your book Good, Good, Outward, how to embrace the embarrassing and celebrate the cringe to become the bravest you? How can we find out more about your speaking? I can tell your incredible speaker, just the way that you showed up in this interview today. And then, you know, where can we find your research study?

Yes. So hennapriar.com, the website, that's the easiest way to find all the stuff about the speaking, the research. It's all in the top menu. You can find everything there. You can also find my LinkedIn learning courses, Inc. Magazine column. It's all linked if you go to hennapriar.com. And I'm Hannah Pryor on all the socials in the book. Honestly, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your favorite indie bookshop. We just re-released in paperback. And so grateful for that opportunity. The new paperback is so cute and so lightweight and so easy to carry around. And, And yeah, the cool thing about the paperback is we include the research study in the back. That was not in the original hardcover version. So if you get the paperback, you'll get that as a bonus. But anywhere books are sold. I love it. And I love even the image here of the teeth, you know, feel where it's like awkward or cringy. Okay, so let's do some rapid fire here to learn more about you.

I don't know. What's the most awkward moment you've experienced on stage and how did you recover? I'll never forget it. It was actually in Orlando. I was doing a keynote for the Fresh Produce Association. And even though I had done this keynote a million times, I realized that there was an entire teaching section that I just skipped. Like completely skipped. I don't know what happened. Like my mind blank. And I remember in that moment, I had a choice. I either call myself out or I had to like do some quick thinking of, can I pretend that this was always meant to be the order? Now, you know, Now let's go back to understand where did this actually even come from? So I opted for a choice to, but I remember like my face was hot because I'm thinking, holy henna, how are you going to recover from this? But I did it that way. Sandra, nobody knew.

Nobody was any the wiser. But internally, and a bureau partner was watching me. And so I was like extra, oh my gosh, the end of my career. But I kept that self-talk. You know, I tried to get back to neutral, you know, in our limitless minds turn. And recovered from it. And again, I don't think I've ever felt so hot or embarrassed or worried about that situation in my life. But kept the head on straight, told myself a more serving story.

And we managed. I don't think anybody was any of the wiser. That's what I tell a lot of my speaker friends were just getting started, you know, that you maybe know how you want it to be perfect in your mind. But the audience has no idea. Yeah. Can I give you one more quick bonus one? Of course. I have a, I just remembered it.

I had, in my intro script, I have, you know, a few things about me business-wise, but then they say she's a 32nd generation Pakistani princess, which doesn't really mean anything. And she's an incurable chocaholic. So the person introducing me read it as she's an incurable alcoholic. Oh, no. And so they were mortified, right? They're like, oh, oh, no, no, no, this says chocaholic. But then, you know, again, I could have made that worse or made her feel embarrassed. But throughout the talk, I made little playful, you know, suggestions. about, oh, better need a martini now or, you know, just something. And again, it took a situation that could have been uncomfortable for everyone and made it this shared inside joke, this shared moment of humor. But again, that takes practice. I think as a beginner speaker, I wouldn't have felt the confidence to do that. Now it's like, okay, how do I take that? Try to add some humor to it and run.

There's lots of little things we can do. Thank you. Thanks for just those examples. Those that make you also really human. If awkwardness were a superpower, what would your superhero name? be. The whole. Or maybe that is a superpower.

It is a superpower. I would say probably something like the cringe queen. It feels empowering. I love it. Who do you think in terms of pop culture character? Do you think really embraces awkwardness the best? I was thinking Ted Lassow. Mm-hmm.

He's a good one. No, he's a great one. I don't know about character, but I really love the way Aubrey Plaza plays a lot of her characters like she can just be so deadpan and she says it wrong and there's a lot of weird silences but she owns them so well that you're like i kind of love it like i'm kind of obsessed with her so i think she's one who i don't talk about a lot in my book i and i stella delawareian we grew up in the same state she's one i think that plays her a lot of her characters have that through line of slight awkwardness not quite that like for a beautiful woman not quite that you know

gravitas or confidence that we've come to expect. She's always got this slight edge of like, I don't know the right thing to say, which I just think is awesome. Cool. All right, last rapid fire question. If you could put one, you know, awkward survival kit item in everyone's bag, let's say before a big meeting or before a big speech, what would it be? Oh, gosh. I think it would be some version of like a post-it note that just says breathe. Because, you know, that emotion, it makes our heart race. It makes us feel all sorts of things, and there's not much that can't be solved with a big deep breath. That big deep breath is going to give you time to rewrite your story, to remember that you're human, and to find access to that next best step. So just take a breath.

And I loved everybody of our conversation today. I'm going to reread the things I wrote down from today as a way of summarize. So you talked at the beginning about this idea of like staying awkward, brave, and kind and Briné Brown and how that really inspired you to really examine this emotion of awkwardness. It's not who we are. It's how we feel. And we talked about like faux vulnerability, like fake vulnerability as something to avoid and how that seems to be kind of the culture right now. We talked about awkwardness is lower on the scale of emotional exposure than vulnerability. I thought that was really powerful. When we talked about, about like how to embrace the awkward, you said, like, do the mindset work ahead.

What is your story, your contamination story or your redemption story? Freaking love that and how we can choose that story and we can really work on our own conditioning of these like awkward moments. We talked about the avoidance of awkwardness actually increases awkwardness and that it impacts the performance, our ability to embrace the awkwardness. and leadership. And we have to keep on developing that social muscle. One third would rather clean a toilet than ask for help. So thank you so much, Hena. I appreciate you. Make sure everyone goes to Hennapriar.com to pick up her book, Good Awkward, and to read her research study about social

muscles. Thank you so much for being here today. I loved every minute. Thank you for having me, so much fun. Way to go for finishing another episode of the high performance mindset. I'm giving you virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe. And you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and enjoy my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can add over to Dr. Cyndra. That's d R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.