Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman on Thriving in the Future of Work EP 280

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

On Passion Struck, I interview Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD, about the future of work and how professionals can successfully adapt to constant change. Kellerman, a seasoned healthcare professional and Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp, discussed the importance of resilience, creativity, and adaptability in today's dynamic work environments. Dr. Rosen Kellerman is the co-author with Martin Seligman of Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, and Connection―Now and in an Uncertain Future. Adapting to Tomorrowmind with Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: Strategies for Success During the conversation, Gabriella highlights the need for both companies and individuals to develop a range of skills, including emotional intelligence, problem-solving abilities, and the capacity to form meaningful connections. She also offered advice on thriving in the future of work, emphasizing the importance of focusing on soft skills, being open to change, and cultivating a sense of purpose in one's career. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/gabriella-rosen-kellerman-on-future-of-work/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview:  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/qR3z2VoR7t8  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Gaia Bernstein on how to overcome tech addiction: https://passionstruck.com/gaia-bernstein-fix-the-tech-addiction-crisis/  Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on PassionStruck. I think that's one of the greatest organizational and managerial challenges today, is how do you preserve engagement in an environment where we're constantly pivoting and constantly adjusting our strategy? Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, Jon Armyles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.

If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest Ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 280 of PassionStruck, ranked by Apple as one of the top 20 health podcasts and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn. Had to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. I have a very special announcement. Starting last week, Passion Struck is now also part of the AM FM 247 broadcast, where you can find the show Monday and Friday from 5-6pm Eastern time on about

40 celestial radio stations, as well as tune in and all the normal places where you can find podcasts. Please go there where I'm going to focus episodes from the vault and also new episodes that you won't hear on the podcast. In case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed Laurie Gottlieb, who was a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, which is being adapted for TV with Eva Longoria. I also interviewed Cyrus Cumbata and Robbie Barbaro, the co-authors of the New York Times bestselling book Mastering Diabetes. Please check them both out if you haven't had a chance.

And I wanted to say thank you so much for your continued support of the show. Your ratings and reviews have gone such a long way in bringing so many people into the Passion Star community where we can give them weekly doses of hope, meaning, connection, and inspiration. And I know our authors just like today's love to hear from you and see your reviews. Now let's discuss today's episode in our workplaces where we spend most of our waking hours. We often find ourselves unhappy, tired, and unwell, the constant flux, an unpredictability, and have a detrimental effect on our mental health, relationships, and physical well-being. With the pandemic already accelerating the future of war, it feels like that we are constantly trying to stay afloat with all the information and all the tests that are hitting us from

all angles. Despite all these challenges, we are not without hope. In fact, we have the potential to emerge from this era even stronger. This optimistic message is conveyed in Gabriella, Rosen Kellerman's new book, co-written with Marty Seligman, the renowned founder of Positive Psychology, Tomorrow Mind, thriving at work with resilience,

creativity, and connection, now and in an uncertain future. Gabriella draws on their combined research to demonstrate how we can rise from the occasion and truly thrive in the face of adversity at work. In today's episode, we'll explore the following topics. The fact that our species has faced the challenge of adapting to new work environments before, labor transformations such as the shift from foraging to agriculture and from agriculture to

industrialization have caused significant human suffering in the past. The current transformation, driven by technology technology poses a new and unexpected threat war well-being. Our ancient brains are wired for this dynamic environment as they evolved to hunt and gather. The unique characteristics of a forger's brain are once again essential, and the future has a potential to rehumanize work in new and inspiring ways. To thrive through this new change, we need to develop five building blocks of resilience, emotional regulation, self-efficacy, cognitive agility, optimism, and compassion. These are the psychological bedrock of our ability to adapt to change. Feeling that we matter and have meaning at work is essential for motivation and success. Original research on the concept of mattering shows the link between the

drive to matter and our success at work. There are interventions that can help individuals and organizations who increase the sense of mattering. Building trust quickly, especially across geographical distance and with people who are different from ourselves, is a vital skill in today's hybrid and distributed team. Prospection, the ability to anticipate and plan for the future is the meta skill for our era, positioning us ahead of change. This skill is particularly important in the tech industry, where products can quickly take on unintended uses that their builders had never foreseen. Gabriella shares the science and interventions

needed to help us build the skill. Creativity and innovation are uniquely human gifts, and they are essential in today's world of work. We will learn about the four creative types of thinking and the concept of creativity hygiene. Lifestyle behaviors that facilitate greater innovation. Dr. Gabriella Rosenkellerman has an impressive professional background.

Having held multiple high-level positions at better up as the chief product officer and chief innovation officer, as well as the head of better up labs. She is also the co-founding CEO of Lifelink and has advised various companies in the fields of healthcare, coaching, and behavioral change technology. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review,

Forbes, and more. Tomorrow Mind is her debut book. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled and honored to have Dr. Gabriela Rosenkellerman on the Hashanstruck Welcome Gabriela. Thank you, John. Lovely to see you. Lovely to see you as well. And I'm going to start the conversation

out with the topic that you started out as a psychiatrist and you practice medicine for the first phase of your career, which was somewhere between eight to 10 years. That can be a very difficult thing to walk away from. I like to highlight stories on the show where people reinvent themselves, and I wanted to ask you, what was the motivation for you to change directions? Thanks for the question and thanks for highlighting this because of course it's something we all need to do in our world of work and then be terrifying. For me, that reinvention was the most terrifying that I've encountered because it was driven by a sense of what I was doing was not the right thing, rather than a calling to what was next.

It took me a good two to three years to find the right next thing after I decided that clinical medicine wasn't it. I went into medicine and psychiatry in particular, out of a deep curiosity about the brain, a desire to help advance the knowledge. And an eyes wide awareness of just how little we do know about the brain and just how little we have to offer our patients. It's a pretty narrow toolkit compared to other areas of medicine. But for me, that was exciting.

Not meant I could spend my career innovating and helping to broaden the toolkit and advance the knowledge base. It turns out that for all kinds of reasons, clinical psychiatry is not where a lot of that innovation is happening. We rely on our clinical psychiatrist to do treatment with the tools that we have, rather than to create new tools. And once that hit me, it was hard for me to see feeling satisfied with that as a career for the next

40 years of my life. And so again, I left knowing and needed to find a place with greater innovation, but I didn't know what that was. And it was a lot of training, a lot of monetary investment to walk away from. Well, you'll probably find this ironic. I actually read that the entire DSM-5 manual because I found that myself, as I was going through dealing with post-traumatic stress from the military and other things in my life, that all of a sudden I was being categorized in these five, six, seven different ways that I didn't feel like I fit any of the categorizations. And so I started reading up on this, and it's interesting.

I've actually done a couple episodes on it that show that most of the stuff in the DSM manual isn't really backed up by basically, Bruce is what I found. And a lot of it is there to give guidelines, but it's so overlapping that it causes a ton of confusion, even for the practitioners who are using it. Yeah, for sure. So first of all, that's fascinating. And not a manual that was intended to be read, covered, a cover. So it is to you for the grandmas to take. And yeah, I mean, there's a reason it's number five, because it's, we keep iterating on it and finding better ways and It's meant to help the practitioner

categorize it's meant to help insurance companies make sense of why different treatments for different people a lot of it is consensus expert consensus-based it is not yet data driven in the way that we think that diagnostic criteria are and that's has to do with the lack of some of the objective data criteria we take for granted and other fields of medicine. For practitioners, it can be equally confusing and they each tend to find their own way into it of making sense sense of it, and figuring out how they're gonna use it. And then as soon as a new manual comes out, they have to start all over. I used to think that starting all over was a frustrating thing,

but now it strikes me as actually a very healthy thing for a field, especially one that is so young in the science to have to every few years, every decade, really reset your understanding of what these disorders are and who fits where. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so interesting now how all this science is coming out that is showing that most mental disorders are actually metabolic disorders

and the role that our gut is playing into even things such as depression and anxiety, all the way to things such as schizophrenia. So you're right. We're entering a huge new chapter, I think, of psychology and psychiatry right now. Yeah, I love that science and the broader movement. We used to talk about the brain body connection. As a doctor, you're training in psychiatry and neurology teaches you that the nervous system is,

it's not just about the brain, it's not just even about the brain in the spinal cord, it's our entire physical being is infused with nerve endings and all of that. It gets processed largely up in the brain, but we are gathering data from every part of our body. And so just as we would think of a computer system as having a networked set of computers that's all gathering data and comparing notes, that's much more when our body is like than having one computer mainframe in the brain and then a couple of wires going out. It's much more of a network system of information gathering and processing. Yes, it certainly is. And another thing I found out about you listening to a number of your podcast interviews that is similar to something that led me to forming this podcast and the passion struck community is I just look at all the advancements that mankind has made throughout the centuries.

Yet we find ourselves here today possibly undergoing more human suffering than we ever have in the history of our species. And to me, there are more people right now who are beaten, bored, broken, battered, lonely, hopeless. beaten, bored, broken, battered, lonely, hopeless. And I am really trying to get to the root causes of that through this podcast and through my own research, but I know it's something that's also a trigger for you

and part of the reason that you're doing what you are doing today. And I was hoping you could just talk about that a little bit. I love to. And it's wonderful to be with the kindred spirit. So I went into this field because at a young age, as I mentioned, I was very curious, excited about the brain intellectually, but at an emotional level, it really bothered me that even though I was growing up with all my needs taken care of, I was raised in a middle class community and my parents invested the money that they had to spend on our education. So really well cared for and similarly so were my friends, so were all the members of our broader community.

And yet there was still so much suffering whether it was parents going through divorce or starting in adolescence, friends with suicide attempts and deep depression and all kinds of really difficult conditions that meant that it didn't actually matter that our physical needs were being met. It didn't matter that our expected lifespan was longer than ever before and our standard of living was higher than ever before. The lived experience was still filled with so much suffering that it seemed like the rest of it was just a waste. And how could it be the case that we had made so much advance as a society as a species in lengthening our life and increasing our standard of living, but not in the quality of the lived experience. So that bothered me at the micro level of each and every person I cared about in my own suffering that it couldn't make sense of. And at the macro level of thinking about where are we on this

as a species? Why haven't we been able to move the needle? A lot of that we're going to talk about today. And I am going to show a cover of your book today, Tomorrow Mind, that you wrote with Marty Seligman. That's quite an honor for the listener who doesn't know who Marty Seligman is, which I'm figuring is a very small component of our audience. Can you tell me about how this collaboration came to fruition? Sure. So Marty was someone whose work I discovered later in my own career. So maybe in the

arts and early teens, he had been coming to, I think, broad public awareness in the 90s and again in the arts and beyond for the movement of positive psychology. And positive psychology is as many who are listening will know, is all about saying, let's focus on building the life well-lived, let's focus on building well-being, and building the science of well-being, and taking matters our focus, rather than focusing on how do we resolve psychopathology.

So a very different approach and was I think something I would have gravitated toward much earlier how I met up with it earlier, but my my training didn't overlap with that moment that it really hit popularity and became something being taught in all universities. Fast forward to where I was in my career during this period, so I began working in Tuck. I had begun using software to build tools, to help build stress management, resilience, help people again at a broad population level,

learn to diminish suffering and build tools for a well-being. And so of course, Marty's work became very important to me and not endeavor. And in 2017, I had gone from being an advisor to a full-time employee at Better Up, which is where I am today, six years later. And in 2017, the CEO of Better Up, Alexi Robacho had asked me to start Better Up Labs,

which is the research arm of the organization. And in doing that, I was very busy sending up our research priorities, hiring the staff. But it was also very important to me to figure out who should our foundational advisors for that research lab be. And as you can guess from everything I've said so far, Marty's name was at the very top of the list. So I reached out, we began a conversation and then ultimately spent some time together in Philadelphia with me explaining the opportunity with better up,

which is a massive, no global organization that helps provide coaching to individuals, corporations as they're growing personally and professionally. And so we gather a lot of data. We have an opportunity to train thousands of coaches in new science and expose them to that and our coaches love to be exposed to it and part of that. And so for him, this was a way to bring practical application to the science that he'd been building and

championing for so long. And so it's been now six years of collaboration. We've done all kinds of studies together from theoretical science to experimental intervention studies to deep data analysis on both active and passive data of individuals as they're growing through growth and change in adulthood and in the professional environment. Yeah, it's such well-done research and it comes out throughout the entire book. And just for the audience, if you're not familiar with Marty, he is known as the father of positive psychology. And you can look at all his research and other books that he's created as well. Well, I'm going to dive into the book. You open it up, discuss, and gram pain. And gram and I,

as I was reading a story, actually, I have a few things in common. When I was in the military, I was an information warfare officer, and I was doing things with advanced cryptology, and were for our officer, and I was doing things with advanced cryptology, etc. long before they were mainstream in the early 90s about the same time the first CISO came on the scene, chief information security officer, if the audience is unfamiliar with that term. And I actually got out of the military and then went into consulting and eventually became the cybersecurity practice leader for Arthur Anderson for the Southwest, unfortunately, Anderson is no longer a company today

and it led me to become the first chief information security officer for a company called Lennese, which at the time was a $15 billion company that had financial services, real estate, investment arms and construction services services, based out of Sydney, Australia. But during part of that time, I lived in Atlanta. And where I'm going with this is, while I was in Atlanta, I ran into a close friend of mine, Rich Bates.

And Rich is very famous now in the CSO world because he has held two of the largest CISO roles at AIG and Wells Fargo, and now recently was appointed as the CISO for the Central Intelligence Agency. However, what most people don't know about Rich is that when I was the CISO at Lenley, he was the CISO for a company called Choice Point, which

at the time was one of the most prominent companies doing background searches. And during his time as CISO, where he also won information security executive of the year during the same year, there was a massive cybersecurity breach that was a huge nationwide deal. There is a massive cybersecurity breach that was a huge nationwide deal and the company tried to pin the entire thing on him. And I remember at that time, it was below point for Rich and his career, but as I just described, he found a way to rebuild his career from that professional disaster to now being one of the most recognized people in the space.

And I bring that whole story up because it parallels in many ways, Grand Story. And I wanted to ask, what can we learn from Grand Story and from aquafax's cybersecurity disaster and how he, himself, like Rich, found himself at the edge of an abyss and was able to rebuild himself from that disaster. Yeah, thank you for the question.

And by the way, you should absolutely reach out to Graham and make the connection. I think he would love to talk to you. And I'm happy to also facilitate that. So Graham, as you said, very similarly, had a long and pretty illustrious career as a C-so. He was a early pioneer in the space and really jumped on this wave of how do we help our companies, how do we help our client customers take good care of their data and protect it. And he was Equifax for a good amount of time

before the major event that everybody knows about. And by his description, there were a number of security breaches that happened before then. So it wasn't that this was unknown and security breaches do happen, in part because the world is changing and we're learning and there's only so much you can do to anticipate all of the different ways that this very complex stock of technology that any major corporation is built on today, all of the different gaps that can emerge. It's not like a set of physical pipes with leaks, right? There's interactions and then their software updates and it's just a massive job to keep on top of. So Graham and his group were doing their best and things would come up into his recollection. The company would kind of learn

from it and they would move on to the next thing. And nobody was really fired, at least not in some very dramatic way for those events, because they were doing their best and doing what they're supposed to do. When that major event happened in 2017, the breach happened through a piece of software that Graham's team oversaw. There were still hundreds of people involved and hundreds of people who were working on it and actually were aware of the breach. And they thought they had aware of this issue with the software. And they thought they had patched it. And of course, they had in and it turned into this massive breach. But because it caught the public attention, because it was of the scale, there then were many people who were either terminated or sent out for early retirement and the higher profile ones.

There's not a public record now of where they are in the intervening six years and what's become of them and by Gramps telling their finding their way in life and in was branded the human error. The human error was associated as an epithet with his name based on testimony that the CEO of ExoFox provided to Congress. He has taken that and now he wears it as a badge of honor. He's published an autobiography, which I highly recommend and it's called the human error. He talks about his story and he uses his lessons and his wisdom to help other companies with this. He's learned how to take this massive event as a point of value, a point of his own value that he went through this. He learned all of these things both about the information

technology but also the sort of organizational pathology around it that resulted in the outcome at Equifax. And he now advises companies on it and has a tremendous amount to offer them. So to your point, what determines whether someone is out there telling their story and wearing it as a badge of honor and creating value from it versus quietly fading into the background or maybe really struggling and I have to imagine some of those who went through this aquifax. Really we're struggling with it. It's very human and natural to imagine. A lot of that is resilient. It's also the four other skills we talk about in our book, a sense of meaning and purpose, the ability to have foresight to see ahead to an x-character, the social network social

support, and then this ability to creatively reinvent yourself through an innovative capacity. Well, we're gonna deep dive into all those different topics, but I did wanna say I think Graham would make for a very interesting interview on this podcast. So yes, I would love to meet him. And for the audience, if you're not familiar with cybersecurity in these big companies,

you may think, oh, they knew about this potential security vulnerability, and these things are easy to correct. We have to realize that at any single time, when you're in these companies, you're dealing with hundreds of vulnerabilities that are out there. And I know my role is at Lenley's Lowe's Dell. You're talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of not only servers, but also workstations and access points that you have to deal with. And so when you're applying many of these security patches, it requires reboots of systems. Some may not be compatible because of the age of the software that's on them. So it takes a ton of coordination to get this right because you could put the patch on

reboot a critical service such as Dell.com and it doesn't come up. And so there is so much work that goes behind the scenes, not just with the security department, but with the other departments, including the user community to get these things right. So it becomes a very complex undertaking and it's ever evolving all the time. So I also wanted to put that out there because it's not as easy at all as a scene.

And the CEO of Equifax famously shared with Congress that just to put in perspective, the volume of data that these ceasos are trying to protect. If you think about the Library of Congress, which is the largest library in the world, If you think about the Library of Congress, which is the largest library in the world, Equifax at that time was handling 1200 times the amount of data in the Library of Congress every day. So that amount is so far beyond what we can even conceive of, and then the weights distributed across all of these systems and all of these versions and interactions between different parts of the stack. It's a tremendous responsibility and one that every generation is learning new vulnerabilities, a really rapid clip.

Yes, and my personal experience with this is that there's never just one scapegoat that you can put the blame on. There's a huge number of people that are typically involved in any of these companies, both on the business side and on the IT side, but I'm going to move on. Next topic I wanted to get into was Burnout. And I have done a series of episodes on Burnout because it's something that I have talked about on the show. I have experienced myself. It's something I wouldn't wish on. Anyone, in my case, I got to the point that I felt emotionally numb. And it's not just me. I recently interviewed New York Times, bestselling authors, Stephen Kotler and Dr. Mark Hyman, who both during our episodes discussed how they themselves experienced burnout, happening to so many people. And what I wanted to ask you, Gabriella, why is work taking such

a toll on our physical and mental wellbeing? Sure. So there's a lot of discussion about the impact of COVID on physical mental wellbeing and some of the factors there were the isolation, so being socially isolated is for sure a huge factor. I think I want to zoom out to answer your question though and just say that this era of work, even before COVID accelerated this, has been defined by constant and unpredictable change. And so in addition to the daily labors that were engaged and were being asked to very often change talks, we're being asked to walk away from things that we're used to at work are not really there anymore. Even the idea that we used to stay at one institution for most of our careers, no one does that anymore.

Average tenure might be three or four years, even less in younger generations. The way that we are wired to manage change has to do with how we evolved as hunter-gatherers and change in that environment, typically meant something sudden and fast and threatening, like an avalanche or a predator, and we had to respond quickly. That's why it's called fight or flight, right? It's not called fight flight or celebrate. There wasn't this idea that it could be something excellent, that was actually coming our way. Whereas today, when we're hearing these whisperings of change, it could be something excellent, it could be something neutral, or it could be something negative. And we have to be able to tolerate lots and lots of those rumblings of change, and then the actual changes themselves with neural hardware, that's why

I had to interpret that as threat. Over time when we interpret so many things constantly as threat, that is exhausting. It's fatiguing. It takes a great toll on us and it puts us in a state of helplessness, which is not too far ahead of something like a clinical depression. So there's a tremendous amount about the way that our world operates today that threatens our well-being in pretty fundamental ways. My gosh, it certainly does. And you're seeing it all around us because we're in this time, as I mentioned before, of extreme employee burnout, but not only that, skyrocketing employee disengagement rates that

are just affecting so many companies. And I think when you come down to it, from what I have seen, a lot of it comes down to people don't feel passionate about the work that they're doing They don't feel like they're involved or connected to the strategy of these firms They don't feel like they have meaning in what they're doing and without that sense of passion or being passion struck in your job It can lead to this feeling of being dehumanized By the work that you're doing. And so I wanted to ask you a lot of the work that you and Marty did looks at,

how do you rehumanize work in new and inspiring ways? And I was hoping that you could just touch on that. I'd love to speak to what you just got into about the disengagement. One dimension of disengagement that I want to highlight is that all of this change means that we're frequently changing strategies, which means we're changing what we have our employees focus on. And we've all lived that. We've been told to shift from working on one thing to another or something we might have been working on for a year, 18 months or even just three months

but really cared about. And now we have to change directions. There's a sense of victimization that can result from that. There's definitely a sense of detachment. Well, if I'm just gonna walk away from my work, I'm not gonna get as invested this time around. I'm going to pull back a bit more and not kind of pour myself into it.

And I think that's one of the greatest organizational and managerial challenges today, is how do you preserve engagement in an environment where we're constantly pivoting and constantly adjusting our strategy. A huge part of that is how do you give visibility to everyone, to the forces that are influencing those changes. So that rather than be as a receiver of the message of pivot, we're all attuned to those wins of change together. And we're all taking pride in the ways that we are navigating those signals, reading those signals ahead of others and picking up on those signals. If that can be this meta project that we're invested in together, then it's a lot easier to get by in when we need to shift from one talk to another. Well, I think that ability to see into the future and to recognize changing patterns and

how to adapt to them is extremely important. One of the things I feel about humanity is that we were built to be the ultimate learning machine, which is what gives me hope for our future. And I have my own upcoming book still waiting on the date from the publisher, but hopefully not too far into the distant future. But I go into much of this, similar to you do in the book, that I think history ends up repeating itself in many ways. And just as we were hunter-gatherers, and then the agricultural revolution, we took a big shift when we went then the agricultural revolution. We took a big shift when we went into the industrial revolution, and I think we're coming out of that, and I see us actually shifting back in some ways to what we were before the

industrial age. And if you look at the way things have shifted over the past 30, 40 years, you'll see this chart that shows people going into large companies on this steady rise and the number of people who are going into small businesses or entrepreneurs almost in the same exact decline. And it's caused this thing throughout most Western culture where people are not changing and evolving and adopting like we once were 40, 50, 60 years ago, and I personally am making this prediction that I think we are going to become more knowledge workers in the future where instead of us working for these mega companies, I think more people

are going to become independent to contractors, so to speak, where you're working similar to the way people are doing on Fiverr or Upwork, and you're an independent contractor, where your skill set is specialized, just like in the agricultural age, people might have been blacksmiths or other specialists. I think that's where we're evolving and I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, really interesting. I mean, as you know, there's a whole chapter in our book, tomorrow mind, about the ways that today's world of work allows us to return to the beautiful and native capabilities of the hunter gatherer. I think there's a lots of ways of thinking about specialization in the future. And then

gig workers, and I'm very curious and looking forward to reading your buck to learn more. The way we talk about specialization is that because skills, the sort of quote, hard skills expire so quickly in this day and age, we need to invest in our speed of learning as a sort of meta-scale, and that relates to what we talk about with cognitive agility. So as I think about what you're describing and the specialists, what I would imagine those folks will need to invest in in order to succeed as independent gig workers with specialty skills is upskilling themselves frequently to keep pace with new technological developments. I do think and we're already seeing this

as that in the corporate environments more and more what we need are generalists who can flex in from one business need to another one department to another and have a skill set that's more about these meta skills, these deeply enduring human skills, things like collaboration, resilience, foresight, and fortunately those don't expire so we can really invest in those as a career long journey. Yeah, and I think what you just brought up is so important. I have a 24-year-old son. He's right now doing his GMATs, but it's taken him a while to kind of figure out where does he want to go next because he comes to me all the time saying things are changing so much. He hears me speak about hundreds of millions of jobs that

are going to be put out of place by AI and automation and robotics. And he's just like, I don't know how I'm ever going to be able to keep up with this pace of change. And what I've always told him is that core basic skill sets are going to be paramount no matter how much things shift. Having empathy, emotional intelligence, or sight like you brought up resilience, how to communicate and have rapport with others, these are going to become even more important, I think, in the future as both you and Marty outlined in the book. And I'm not going in the order of your chapters, something that I often do during my interviews. I'm gonna bounce around here,

but the first area I wanted to talk about was perfection, because I think among many skills that we need to have, this ability to see forward in the future, but then know how to apply that at a micro level in our lives is gonna to be extremely important. And can you discuss what perspective is in case the audience is unfamiliar with this and why it's one of the most important psychological skills you need today? Absolutely. So, perspective is our ability to imagine and plan for the future. It's not about fortune telling or predicting the future. It's about imagining

a wide enough array of possible futures, but then in the present, we can position ourselves in an agile manner around them. So that's really exactly what you just described you're doing with your son right now. It's a beautiful example where he's looking out and saying, okay, and I might disrupt this industry. That industry is going in whatever direction it is. What does that mean for me today and what terms of where I should invest in the conclusion that you all are getting to in terms of investing in these enduring, deeply human capability is which form this core, generous skill set for today. It is a beautiful conclusion and it will serve him tremendously well. We also talked about

prespection earlier and its importance that we didn't name it in the context of employees who are being asked to pivot from one area to another and they are feeling victimized by that change rather than empowered because they are so far downstream, whereas if they were involved either of their own volition or because their corporations brought them along to help be thinking ahead to what could be coming, paying attention to those cues, to even know what cues to pay attention to, then they are part of the prospection journey. They're part of building that capability for the organization. And maybe two months ahead of the changepection journey, they're part of building that capability for the organization. And maybe two months ahead of the change they're actually going to make, they're already

where that might be coming and they might be planting some seeds of resource investment to be prepared for that rate. And I described this recently as a probabilistic view of futures where we want to have a sense of, okay, probabilistically, path A is where things are going. That's where I'm most heavily investing. But there's a few things that might mean a quick trigger to path B. And so I want to get a few things set up so that I'm ready to go there if I need to. Path C is a sleeper, but I'm not losing sight of it. And I'm planting a few very strategic, very small seeds right now to help me if I can get there.

And path B or C may never come to B, but you are positioned in a much more empowered stance in case they do. And a much more agile way of thinking that means that our companies are better able to take advantage of B or C if they do pop rather than us being stuck and wedded to path A because we just can't get ourselves unstuck out of that one way of being. Yeah, I actually have a chapter on this that I call the B and the turtle effect. And what I

describe is you've got a turtle who's typically going down this slow patient half towards a distant goal. And then you've got the bees who are very busy on the actual duties of what they must do today to survive and it's mixing those two capabilities together that I think is extremely important in the future. And that is how do you have this strategic foresight that you're planning your life,

you're planning your career towards years ahead, but know how to implement it at the micro moments of your life so that you're taking steps towards this tsunami of greatness that you want to become, but you also understand along the ways that they're gonna be obstacles and deviations. And it's how do you pivot, make changes, but still stay on that long path.

So I love it. Well, another area that you did some very original and groundbreaking work around was on the building blocks of resilience. And I was amazed that today you have studied not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people through your work with Marty. And I wanted to ask, what were the five drivers that research found

are the most important to building resilience? Which is another course skill that we need to have. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. And this was work done by the broader team at Better Up Lab. So shout out to all of them. So we have data on hundreds of thousands of people who are doing the hard work of building skills in order to thrive at work.

And we have looked at resilience as an outcome in that data set to see who is individuals, whose teams and whose organizations gets to resilient outcomes in the face of challenge versus those who don't. And what are the skills that got them there? And so we can then work backwards across 150 different potential items to say the top five were the following emotional regulation cognitive agility optimism selfacy and self-compassion. So I'll go quickly through each of those to explain what they are, but these are each critical for resilience and across the five we each have strengths,

and we each have areas where we're not as strong, and so part of building resilience can simply start with saying, okay, of these five, I think I'm stronger in these two, so that's good to know when I'm going through a tough time I'm in the lean on my self-compassion, for example, but I'm going to invest in building these other areas where I have room to grow and those are really going to make a difference in me feeling more resilient. So emotional regulation is simply the ability to experience our emotions, feel them, notice them, but not be controlled reactively by them. Our emotions are full of very important information. But when we are consumed by them, we can behave in ways that are not actually

in keeping with what we would want to be doing. If we could take a step back, re-appraise them, get to a more centered place of executive control, and make decisions from there. Working on emotional regulation is a huge part of adult maturity in general, and it's a lifelong journey. It is something we get better at typically with time

as we get older, and it's a huge part of any coaching or therapy or inner work of any kind. Cognitive agility is the ability to shift quickly and freely between her rise and level scanning of opportunity and focused effort in any one dimension. So when we're hit with uncertainty and we've alluded to this a little bit in talking about perfection, we want to figure out how is that going to play out. And as we said, we're hardwired in these moments of change to think threat bad and to it immediately go to this is going to end in a bad way.

Cognitive agility lets us avoid that, stand back from a moan of uncertainty, think about the broad array of possible outcomes here, and then make a centered decision about which of those we think again is most likely and go on that, but then also dip back up to that horizon level scanning when we need to in order to course-crack. The third optimism, so that is the tendency to see hopeful or positive futures. It is not polyanish, it's not unrealistic, it's very much about our ability to offer a positive explanatory style of these events around us and to see a positive way through. And that helps us really stay motivated. That's how optimism works, it helps us keep fighting the fight, rather than pessimism, which demotivates us just sucks the air out of us and makes us kind of curl up into a bomb.

Self-efficacy is our self-confidence that we can get through change. It's a broader sense of self-confidence that we can accomplish our goals. And's a broader sense of self-confidence that we can accomplish our goals. And it can be built in a very different place. So for those who are on a diet, if you're able to succeed in losing those 20 pounds, you build self-efficacy that you can accomplish your goals in a broader array of realms that's called generalizing. So just working on accomplishing your goals in a structured realistic way is going to help build South Africa. And finally, self compassion is our ability to extend to ourselves the playbook of compassion that we so freely extend to others when they are going through a difficult time. It's much easier for us to think of a friend

or a relative who's going through something challenging and think about how tough that might must be for them, how unfair it is that they have to go through that, how much we care about them and we want to help them feel better. That's not always our first reaction in our own moment of suffering and so we want to draw on that playbook and apply it to ourselves as if what was happening was happening not to us, but to them. Well, thank you for giving all those explanations. And each one of those is so important in the future to how we need to approach work. But not only that, our personal lives as well.

One of the big areas that you talk about throughout the book is creativity, and this is an extremely important area of focus for me as well. In fact, I've done two recent solo episodes on this topic. One was, how do you unleash your creativity? And I released one on five born ways that you can become more self expressive. But I think creative expression is vital in the future.

And I wanted to ask you, what did your research reveal about the importance of creativity and why everyone needs to be a creative now? So in an environment where technology is automating the more wrote components of our job, what's left for us to do is inherently more creative. In addition, because all of this change is happening so quickly and it's novel, we need to be positioned to respond at the edges of the business in creative and innovative ways to those challenges as they arise. They're coming too quickly and they're too novel and form for any other approach to make

sense. Then this sort of distributed decision making, which really positions each and every one of us as meaning to creatively problem solve. We've tried in our research to offer tools sounds like you have done similarly around how do you build that capacity of creativity. It turns out creativity is a much younger psychological science than other areas in part because it's very complicated. One of my bully is about why it's so hard is that parts of it are not within our conscious control. So it relies on a brain network called the default mode network which is not fully within conscious control. Parts of it are involved in dreaming, for example.

And yet that's where a lot of our novel, most surprising ideas come from. So how do you actually build up skills around something that you can't consciously exercise? One of our approaches is to build up the behaviors around it, that enable it, similar to how you might build up a lifestyle that enables better sound or sleep. We can build up a lifestyle that enables better, richer, creative output. Yeah, I love three tips that you put in the book about how you develop creative hygiene

that are analogous to sleep hygiene because they are very similar. It's not as if one day you're going to be self-expressive. It's something that you need to build on. But I think there are very simple ways that you can do it. It's like anything. It's not trying to boil the ocean. It's to pick one thing and then once you start feeling comfortable with it, something I want to

dive into that completely terrifies me as improv classes, but through that one skill that will unlock a whole bunch of other self expressive skills from it, I was hoping that you could go into the four types of creativity. Sure. So part of our work in helping everyone understand that they are creative, that we all have this capability, is to get more concrete about what a creative idea is look like, and we've broken them down into four different types.

So the first is integration. People who think in an integrative, creative manner, and I think I'm one of them, like to bring together ideas that don't previously seem connected, but you find a thread through which it makes more sense to treat things we thought of as separate as similar or the same. You can think about the iPhone as a massive integrative victory, putting all of those tools in one place. The second is splitting, which is almost the opposite of integration.

It's where we take something that was treated as one and divided into many. Something happens a lot in product development where you start with one product line and then you specialize it for different consumers, different subtypes of personas. It happens to tremendous amount in science too, just think of the periodic table of the elements.

The third is the figure-ground reversal, which is where we shift from thinking that the answer to the problem lies right in the foreground and realizing that it's actually in the background and the broader context of the issue. Positive psychology was an example of this, where for so long, we thought that if we focus on what's going wrong in the brain and psychopathology, we'll understand all of these fundamental truths about how to live better.

And it turned out that the focus instead needed to be on living better, on well-being itself and how to build the science of well-being. And so now that's been brought into the foreground. And then the last one is distal. And this is what we often think of as a sort of like lone creative genius who's thinking of something very different from the here and now. If you are a distal creative thinker, you might be familiar with the experience of having a hard time even explaining the idea to people because it's so far out there. It's so removed from our day to day reality. And in commerce, the challenge there is to help bridge the market from where we are today, which is probably not ready for that vision to that ultimate reality and making sure that you don't, as a first mover in that space,

lose the market to someone who comes along later when the market is a bit more available, and you may have wasted a lot of resources in the meantime. Well, when I think of creativity, the thing that goes hand in hand with it is giving yourself a time necessary to be creative. And in chapter seven, one of the things that you go through is And in chapter seven, one of the things that you go through is that we are faced so much today with time famine. And I recently interviewed Juliet Funt and Dory Clark. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, but they both have written two great books around this concept of white space and why we need to create time affluence in our lives and how important it is to have a minute to think.

And I wanted to ask you why is this having time affluence or daydreaming or a minute to think not slacking off but essential. So when we are daydreaming, we are, as I mentioned, using what's called the default mode network, which is so essential as a way of being and thinking we call it the default. We drift in and out of it every few minutes. And as you're listening to this podcast, you surely are drifting off into daydreaming every so often and then coming back and attending to our voices and the content of what we're saying. There's a lot of activity today, including messaging, emails, meetings that deeply interfere with the quality of that daydreaming. In order to get quality default mode network activity, we need to be doing a little bit

of conscious activity, something like walking or weeding in the garden, something we can do on autopilot, but really then letting the vast majority of our brain energy focus on those daydreaming drifting ideas. We interfere with it at our own peril, and when we are working on a creative problem, especially we need to make sure that we are incubating those problems effectively in that default mode network. The time, fam, and mindset, which tells us we're always too busy to do something like that, is going to keep us from allowing that brain network to do what it needs to do. And it will really interfere with the quality of the creative output.

Yeah, and just for the listener, another great book you could refer to or episode is I had Dr. Cassie Holmes, who's an expert on time and happiness on the show, and she's got a great book called Happier Hour that along with Gabriella's book Deep Dive's Time Management. Well, the last section I wanted to cover, and's a very important one is on the topic of loneliness. And it's interesting. I've done some solo episodes on this. I've got an episode coming up with Dr. Julian Hunt-Lunsted, who's one of the foremost experts on this. But I don't think people realize the gravity of loneliness right now. There was a 20-year study that was done over 114 different countries and territories that showed over those 20 years, 33% of the population was lonely. And there has been research by RP that showing well over 45% of adults in the United States are lonely. A statistical report showed that Brazil is the most lonely place on the planet with 56%

of their population showing signs of loneliness. And it's taking a huge toll on our well-being. And I happened to read an HBR article that you co-wrote in 2018. And I wanted to understand from your research, what did it find out are the loneliness workers? We looked using survey data, who was experiencing loneliness the most through a number of different dimensions.

One of them was by profession. Lawyers were one of the loneliest professions out there. And this was actually before the pandemic from talking to my friends who are attorneys, it seems this has gotten worse for them during that significantly. We also interestingly found that people with higher degrees of education were feeling more lonely

at work than people without those higher degrees. We did correct for socioeconomic status, but one of the theories that we have about this is that in forms of work where you might need fewer academic credentials, it might be more about service delivery. It can be more of an in-person collaborative experience, but it's something that we are eager to follow up on in particular because a lot of the predictions about the future of work need that we may need to stay in school longer and get more degrees and so may have many more of us maybe in the category than even are today. ahead and the report was the factor of who you are outside of work greatly influences loneliness. Why is that such a big factor? Well, for many of us, our deepest sense of social support comes from our communities outside of work, right?

And that can be a tremendously powerful buffer for who we are within work. So people, for example, who are part of religious communities, we found that was a big predictor of a low sense of loneliness or high feeling of social support. And that makes sense because of what you're getting access to outside of work. And it diminishes our need to find that within the workplace. Okay. And then I'm going to just parlay this into the next section, which is I think oftentimes

loneliness and meaning have some correlation between the two of them and meaning is something that you've talked about several times. You cover it earlier in your book, but something I found interesting in another article you wrote was that nine out of ten people are willing to earn less money to do more meaningful work. And I was hoping you could discuss why that's the case. Sure. So if you look at lots of different studies on this, there's some basic level of income that we need to get to before this could be true. So depending on the error, it might be 40,000, it might be 70,000, obviously, depending on where you live and cost of living. But once our basic needs are met, we are

willing to give up a huge amount of our current and future earnings in our study. It was 23%, which is more than we spend on a mortgage on average in order to be part of a job that was highly meaningful. We crave meaning, we crave a sense of purpose. We want to wake up every day feeling that our work is important, that we're having impact, and the term we use is that we matter. When we feel that we don't matter, we actually, it's really challenges our will to live, or just our will to wake up every day, and one of the characteristics of depression, one of of the characteristics of depression, one of the defining characteristics of depression

is we feel like we don't matter. And so why am I here? And so a huge part of our well-being is having that. And we would love for the place where we spend the majority of our waking hours on the planet, which is work, to be a source of tremendous meaning and impact. And from the organizational perspective,

when we do feel that, we give a lot more discretionary effort. We are more innovative. We are much more invested, productive in the workplace. So it's a win-win for the employee and the employer to figure out how to cultivate that. Well, thank you for that.

And Gabriella, the last question I always like to ask an author is if there was one key takeaway that you would want to read out the book together, a listener of this podcast, what would it be? That there is hope that we are not doomed, that we have the science we need to understand what skills it takes to thrive in this very unusual environment and to build those skills. Okay, and if a listener wanted to learn more about you, where is the best place that they can go? I have a website, just my name, Gabriella Rosen-Callerman.com or Gabrielakellerman.com. It has information about me,

about the book links to some of our journal articles. You can also learn a lot more about better app at betterapp.com, a lot more about our products, our research, who we are, and what we're doing in the world. Well, and I'm gonna give just one more shout out for this amazing book. I thought it was extremely well-written and informative and I highly encourage the audience,

whether you're at the tail end of your career or someone just entering the workforce that may even be more important to, but it has some great advice here. I think I'm gonna give my copy to my son on how you prepare for the future. So thank you so much for joining us today with such an honor to have you. Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity, John, and for your great work.

It really matters. Thank you so much for that. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Gabriela Rosenkellerman, and I wanted to thank Gabriela Marty Selengman and Atri Books for the honor of having her here on the show today. Links to all things Gabriella will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links in the show notes if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. I'll proceed to go to supporting the show. If you want to watch this on YouTube, you can find us at John Armiles and we also have a Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.

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