Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Tessa West on Why Your Career Is Like a Relationship EP 484

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

In this insightful episode of Passion Struck, we welcome Dr. Tessa West, a Professor of Psychology at NYU and author of the enlightening book "Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You." Titled "Tessa West on Why Your Career Is Like a Relationship," this episode delves into the profound parallels between our careers and personal relationships.Dr. West explains how our emotional connections to our jobs are akin to those we have with our loved ones, filled with ups and downs, complexities, and deep psychological ties. She discusses the importance of understanding these dynamics to achieve career satisfaction and fulfillment. Drawing from her extensive research and real-world examples, Dr. West provides practical strategies for identifying and overcoming common career frustrations, such as identity crises, job drift, and feeling undervalued.Order a copy of my book, "Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life," today!  Recognized as a 2024 must-read by the Next Big Idea Club, the book has won the Business Minds Best Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award, the International Book Awards for Best Non-Fiction, the 2024 Melanie P. Smith Reader’s Choice Contest by Connections eMagazine, and the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Medal. Don't miss the opportunity to transform your life with these powerful principles!Full show notes and resources can be found here:  https://passionstruck.com/tessa-west-on-why-your-career-is-a-relationship/In this episode, you will learn:Losses tend to loom larger than gains in the context of interviewsImportance of understanding psychological aspects of career dissatisfactionHow to identify different types of career dissatisfactionTips for reconnecting with work or deciding to move onImportance of asking about past failures in job interviewsStrategies for breaking out of the busyness trap and being stretched too thinThe impact of risk-taking on career trajectoriesAdvice for those struggling to get out of their comfort zonesAll things Tessa West Ph.D.: https://www.tessawestauthor.com/SponsorsBrought to you by Clariton, fast and powerful relief is just a quick trip away. Ask for Claritin-D at your local pharmacy counter. You don’t even need a prescription! Go to “CLARITIN DOT COM” right now for a discount so you can Live Claritin Clear.--► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to:https://passionstruck.com/deals/Catch More of Passion StruckWatch my solo episode on The 6 Key Steps to Bold Risk-Taking for Personal Growth.Can’t miss my episode withMorley Robbins on How You Reclaim Your Health and VitalityListen to my interview withDr. Will Cole on how to restore your gut-feelings connectionCatch my interview with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald on How to Become a Younger You by Reversing Your Biological AgeListen to Seth Godin on Why We Need Systems Change to Save the PlanetLike 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!

Coming up next on Passion Struck. Losses tend to loom larger than gains. And most of the people you're speaking with will have some insight into why the last person who took on this role failed at it. In fact, they might have more insight about what they did wrong or structurally wasn't in place for them to succeed than they will about what they did right. In fact, we are much better giving failure feedback to people

than we are giving positive reinforcing feedback. And I think that's something a lot of us struggle with. It makes feedback hard, but you can embrace that finding that kind of losses loom larger than gains in the context of the interview and get unique insights about all the things no one is telling you that will lead to your potential failure. Welcome to Passion Struck.

Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. 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 guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 484 of Passion Struck. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show weekly, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways

to be better, to live better, and to make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episodes starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize and convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. I am so excited to announce that passion struck was

a winner of the Mary P. Smith Reader's Choice Award as well as winning Best Non-Fiction Book at the International Book Awards. You can find it on Amazon or wherever you purchase books. In case you missed it, last week I had two fantastic interviews. The first was with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary and I discussed the underlying aspirations he has behind his new children's book, Meet Me in the Middle, and his incredible work with V Friends. Gary is known for his unique insights and practical advice, so you don't want to miss this episode. Dr. Chidi Parikh joined me for our second episode of the week,

and Dr. Parikh is a renowned expert in integrative health and wellness. She shares her journey from practice in conventional medicine to embracing a more integrative approach, highlighting the transformative impact of combining modern medical practices with holistic therapies. She discusses the importance of treating the whole person, mind, body, and spirit, and how this comprehensive approach can lead to profound healing and wellness. And if you liked either of those episodes or today's, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star rating and review.

That goes such a long way in strengthening the Passion Star community where we can help more people to create an intentional life. We and our guests love to hear your feedback as well. Today I have an exceptional guest who's going to transform the way you think about your career. Joining us is my friend Dr. Tessa West, Professor of Psychology at New York University. Dr. West is a leading expert on the science of social relationships boasting over 100 academic publications as well as being a regular contributor to

the Wall Street Journal. Her work has been featured in prestigious outlets like Scientific American, the UNRTC, Financial Times, and even the US Supreme Court. Her first book, Jerks at Work, received rave reviews, and today she's here to discuss her latest groundbreaking book, Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works for You. In today's episode, we delve into Dr. West's comprehensive guide to finding your most fulfilling job yet. Drawing from her extensive research and interviews with thousands who have navigated career changes,

including myself, spoiler alert, Dr. West uncovers deep psychological needs often unmet in our current roles. She identifies five common sources of career frustration, identity crisis, job drift, role conflicts, perpetual second place finishes, and underappreciation. Dr. West provides a working week audit to help you pinpoint your unique psychological stressors, offering actual insights to reshape your career path. This interview is not just about finding a new job, it's about understanding what truly drives your happiness and aligning your career with your values, passions, and purpose. From insider tips on networking and interviewing to crafting a standout resume,

Dr. West's book and this interview are a must read for anyone looking to pivot to a role that brings long-lasting satisfaction. So join us as we explore these transformative insights with Dr. Tessa West. 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 today to have my friend, Dr. Tessa West, join me on passion struck. Welcome, Tessa. Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited today.

I am super excited, too, because we're discussing your book, which comes out today. So I'm absolutely thrilled that you picked my podcast to be one of the ones that is helping to launch it because it is such a great book. But this is your second book, if I understand it correctly. What was the process like for your second book compared to your first one? Oh, I love that question. Well, I wrote this book pretty quickly in about a year. And I think the process

for this one was actually drawing a lot of inspiration from the courses that I teach at NYU. So this book, Job Therapy, is really about embracing your relationship with your career. And I started noticing this kind of weird overlap between how people were talking about their relationships with people, ghosting and simmering and all these kinds of complex emotions that go on and a lot of ambivalence going on and their careers. And after I wrote my first book, Jerks at Work, which is about dealing with difficult people at work,

I was really getting a lot of attention around this idea that even if I solve the problem of difficult people, I'm still not happy at work and I'm not quite sure why. And so I really shifted gears to think about your relationship with your career differently, borrowing from some of the lessons that some of my students gave me when I teach close relationships at New York University. Well, I want to just ask you one question about jerks at work before we dive into job therapy.

In my own book, I have a chapter on what I call the mosquito auditor. And in this, I point out that there are three different types of mosquitoes. There's the invisible suffocator, there's the pain in the ass mosquito, and then there's the blood sucker. And the blood sucker is that type who wants to extract every ounce of blood that they can get from you for their own personal gain. The invisible suffocator is the type who is glass half empty and they're constantly telling you all the negatives

about your life, your career, your idea at work. And then the pain in the ass is that pain in the ass that we all know about. And I wanted to know, do those three types of mosquitoes equate to the jerks that you found in that book? Oh, I love that question. I think the blood sucker type is, is combination between the kind of the kiss-up kick downer and probably a micromanager.

And sometimes we talk about blood suckers or vampires at work, those people who like suck everything out of you, they take all your energy. What I think is interesting is a lot of blood suckers out of you, they take all your energy. What I think is interesting is a lot of bloodsuckers actually have no idea that they're doing this. They show a lot of stress contagion at work. Anytime they're feeling something emotional that's negative, they'll find someone in the office next door to offload all of that kind of leading to this contagion.

And a lot of that kind of negativity is something that is really automatic and people are unaware that they're doing it. It's like, it's almost like a bad habit that kind of negativity is something that is really automatic and people are unaware that they're doing it. It's almost like a bad habit that they have. So I think definitely all of those personality traits, all of those kind of interpersonal dynamics that you talk about in your book, really show up in my book in different places. And I think this negative person, this kind of glass half empty person, I think that can be anyone from a bulldozer who takes over meetings, they're problem focused, not solution focused, even a neglectful boss, they show up last minute, usually just to

criticize to dump on you, create emergencies out of thin air and then disappear again. So some of those kinds of interpersonal traits really show up in all of these places depending upon the motive of the person and their level of awareness. But by and large, I think people, all these mosquitoes are flying around and they have no idea that they are these people, despite lots of consensus around that. Yeah. I wish I would have known more about this when I was way deeper into my career, because the nice thing is once you realize what these entities are, whether it's your

book or my description, it helps you so much to put up the boundaries that can make your life so much better at work once you identify the types of people that you're dealing with, which I think so much of us don't even consider this as we're approaching different people that we have to work with on an everyday basis. Yeah, the labeling helps. I think that once you're able to put a name to the phenomenon that you're observing, it's much easier than to talk to other people at work and say, are you experiencing this kind of thing too? To go up and over, talk to a boss's colleague, these kinds of things.

But you really need to package those behaviors together and then create a typology around them to be able to navigate that. So I love that you've embraced this typology idea as well. And I think it really does help people grasp the problem. Well, that is the hope. And for me, it's been in the chapter that readers have talked to me most about and everyone wants to interview me about. So obviously there's something there.

Well, before you came on the show today, you and I were talking about what you as an NYU professor do during what many professors take as a sabbatical and for you it's not. Can you talk about some of the research that you're doing this summer? Yeah, I would love to. So what I do is I study uncomfortable social interactions and anything from getting feedback from a new coworker or a boss to negotiating with someone who comes from a different country,

has a different accent that you're not familiar with, or is in a different social class. So the work we're actually doing in my lab this summer, we're doing kind of two main projects, both I think are pretty interesting. One is what happens when you interact with someone who's a moral violator. I think a lot of us walk into social interactions thinking if this person is

immoral and we can define that in a number of ways and some of the research I'm doing, we operationalize it as a person who is really into dog fighting or really into things that most of us find morally unacceptable. We anticipate that we'll criticize this person and not want to interact with them, but what really happens, and we often find the opposite, people tend to bend over backwards. They're super nice to people who make them uncomfortable even if they don't approve of this person. So we bring people in, you interact with someone who's violated some kind of moral, we measure your physiology. So we measure how stressed out you are and how those kinds of signals of stress that beneath the skin stress response is often covered

up through your positive verbal behaviors, your over the top gestures, being really nice to someone, asking them how they're doing, even caving early in a negotiation. These are all the kinds of things we do when we're uncomfortable, even if we anticipate being a lot more forward. So we're looking at some work around what happens when people in the workplace have to interact with others who they don't approve of, who they disagree with, who are immoral. We're also looking at how people navigate interracial interactions and how they try to be responsive to one another when individuals they're interacting with have experienced discrimination.

Often, those responses don't come across quite as supportive as we think they are. So all these like little juicy parts around uncomfortable social interactions that require people to really come into the lab, get hooked up to physiology, have these encounters, and then we measure their behaviors and we code things like their smiling and their tone of voice and so forth. So it's really fun work to do, pretty labor intensive. So I have an amazing team of about 20 people who are working actually right now, executing all those studies.

Yeah, I love it. I want to do some work myself with students. So I might have to talk to you after this interview is done about how to do it. I tried to do it through university of Pennsylvania and I got a bunch of students who were interested in doing the work, but I couldn't find a professor who would sponsor them for the work. I almost got Marty Sligman, but he turned it down at the last second.

That guy's super interesting. He could do a whole podcast just on Marty. Oh, and I am so thrilled. He's dedicating the rest of his life to what I want to do the research on, which is the whole topic of unmattering. Why do so many people today feel like they don't matter? Yeah.

And what to do about it. Well, let's jump to your book. So I'll show it again here, Job Therapy. And for the people who are not watching, the subtitle is Finding Work That Works For You. You start out the book with the idea that many of us will question our own career at some point. It certainly happened to me multiple times. What inspired you to focus on the psychological aspects

of career dissatisfaction? I think a lot of us, when we're we are unhappy, we get very kind of utilitarian in our thinking. We think about the structure of work and things like compensation, where we wanna work. Do we want a hybrid office? We think about things like advancement opportunities. And all of that stuff matters, but it only matters after you process

the psychological underpinnings of why you're miserable. And I think there's a lot of kind of existential angst out there, a lot of ennui at work. There's a lot of even anxious boredom. I'm bored, but I'm anxious at the same time. And most of us are not processing those emotions we're feeling around our careers. We're going straight to the what I should be doing next. What kind of job should I be doing next? But I think that our relationship

with our career is like a relationship with another person. And that can involve a lot of ambivalence that can involve sensitivity to things like intermittent reinforcement. Your boss shows up randomly to tell you how good you're doing, but it's not consistent. And that kind of random nature of it keeps you Heather do a career in an unhealthy way. And so all of the kind of same mistakes we make in trying to break up with another person, bad boyfriend or a bad girlfriend, we make when we are thinking about exiting a career, but we don't quite understand why we're making those things. And we underestimate the role that our emotions play in those decisions. And I wanted to write a book about embracing this idea that your career is like a relationship

partner. And because of that, you really need to dig deep to process those kind of underlying psychological experiences first of why you're unhappy and understand what's feeding into those things before you start making moves like networking with new people, exploring new careers, applying for jobs, editing your resume, going on interviews. So it's really about understanding that inner, that individual trajectory that people should be going on. Should they want to advance their career or take something new?

So one of the things I found in my career, and I'm sure many of the listeners have found in theirs is oftentimes you start a job and you end up selecting the job because of the hiring manager who brings you on. But then either they get moved on or they progress to a different position or they leave the company, something happens and you find yourself with a new boss. And sometimes the boss is great and you get along with them and maybe it's even an improvement to the person who hired you. But I've also faced the case where a new person comes in and we're just like oil and water

in the relationship. And you talk about a personal relationship. Well, this is a personal relationship you would never enter into because it would almost be like that, that date that you go on by going on a blind date of some sort. And you've realized in the first 30 seconds that this is never going to work out. What does a person do in that type of situation? Because it's one that many people face.

Yeah, I think this is such a fascinating question. I have a chapter in my book called The Drifted Apart. It's the person who used to love their job and they no longer do, and they're nostalgic about the way things used to be. And when I try to dig deep to figure out why people have drifted apart, it's those interpersonal relationships that actually rise to the top of the pile. It's not even necessarily that their career goals have changed or that the industry has changed, it's that they have a new boss, they have a new team member,

or they just have a new person in the office next to them who's not even on their team. And these kind of small interpersonal dynamics can really change with a drop of a hat in our jobs. And we have no control over the relationships we select into, and we have no control over the degree to which people leave a career. I think understanding how much your day-to-day stress, so I'll answer this in two ways. First, the first step is to actually understand how much your day-to-day stress is determined by those relationships and by those interpersonal dynamics. And I think you have insight that those things matter. I think a lot of people maybe feel it, but indirectly, but they haven't

really nailed down what the issue is. that those things matter. I think a lot of people maybe feel it, but indirectly, but they haven't really nailed down what the issue is. And so you should measure what you think is going to stress you out beginning of the day, what actually stresses you out at the end of the day. I did this in my book and there's often a mismatch, but what I found are the things that stress people out at the end of the day are often things that they're used to, even though they don't process them as stressors and they're almost always interpersonal in nature.

They're a boss interrupts me and so on and so forth, those kinds of little day-to-day dynamics. Once you figure that out, I think you then have to identify how much control you have for that particular stressor. So if it's a negative interpersonal relationship, it's someone interrupting you, your boss putting a new meeting on the calendar, something like that. Then you have to understand the degree to which there's going to be uncertainty in predicting that stressor and how much control you have over mitigating it in the future.

And for me, these interpersonal dynamics really come down to control. Can I avoid the bad ones? Can I be more proactive about engaging in the good ones? And certainty. Can I actually predict when these bad ones are going to happen even if I can't completely control entering into them? And if the answer to both of those is no, I'm neither certain and I have no control, then I think that's when you're in a situation where you might want to start exploring something

else. The second thing I'd say is don't always feel like an in the moment workplace change is going to be completely catastrophic. I think you talk to people who've been in careers for a long time. They've seen a lot of trends. They've seen a lot of relationships going in and out. And what I'm seeing is a lot of the younger generation

making pretty big job moves, pretty big even career jumps because of a transient change, because of one relationship dynamic that has altered the workplace. And because they haven't developed a muscle for dealing with conflict, they jump into a new job to get out of that. And I think you do need to be a little bit patient. You need to understand the trajectory of these things. How sticky are they? How likely are they to change again in the future? And I

think those are two main things that I tell people. Yeah, I often think though, it's one of the major reasons that people leave companies and or transfer out of certain groups is they don't see that longer term perspective and they look at the shorter term impact on their life and can't get beyond it. Absolutely or they make decisions around short-term games like a bigger bonus but they don't realize relationships matter a lot more than those things. And there's lots of research to support that.

I wanted to jump to in the introduction of the book, you have a great short quiz that's titled, What Type of Career Goer Are You? And if you go through this quiz and take it, which it's worth the price of the book just to take this short quiz, you have different categories that people find themselves in, which are the categories that you go through in the book. And I'll just put them out here so people understand the ones that we're going to talk about. You already talked about the job

drifter, there's the identity crisis, the role overload, perpetual second place finishes and under appreciation. Which one of these do you think is the most challenging to address and why? I think it's the first one, it's identity crisis. So I open the book with the kind of the most difficult type, the most difficult kind of psychological your state that you could be in. The identity crisis person tends to have been working for a long time. They tend to be highly motivated. They're embedded at work. They have put a lot into becoming high status, good at their job, but they have this kind of existential crisis that this might not be for them. And I think a lot of the sort of inner work they have to do is pulling apart two important

components of identity, which is how central is this identity to who you are as a person. So for me, how central is being a professor, is being an author, to how I see myself as an individual. But then there's a separate component of satisfaction. How satisfied am I with that identity? And I think a lot of people are in this kind of really scary quadrant of high identity centrality. Being a professor is key to who I see myself as a person, but low satisfaction, but I hate it and pulling yourself out of that particular spot and understanding

that you have to explore new identities, date new identities even before you leave a career so you don't have this kind of like hole inside of you that needs to be filled is a huge kind of psychological ask. So I'd say that tends to be a very common place, especially for seasoned career goers. And it's also just a very difficult psychological state to be in, to feel that tension between identifying with something but not loving that thing. In this chapter, you have a starting place, which is based on psychology. You call it learning your psychological starting place. As a person who's listening to this, how do they go about doing that?

I think that I tried to make this easy, as easy as possible for people by giving you opening quizzes for all of these types that are based on well-established psychological tests that have been created by other scholars. And I think the goal here is to understand where you fall on a continuum. Most of us feel all of these things in a lot of these chapters that I talk about.

We're a little bit concerned about our identity. Maybe we no longer recognize our job, but understanding how extreme those feelings are is an important step, and then understanding how consistent those feelings are. So with the identity crisis person, for example, I give you a little quiz that will help figure out where you are on identity centrality and satisfaction. And then I encourage you to measure these feelings over time to look for consistency. And I think everyone needs to understand

how far along they are in that journey. Some people are really early on in that crisis, some people are later. And I give you measures, little tests that you can take that you can retake throughout your journey. You can retake these as you continue exploring new careers or as you try to understand what a new job would look like in a different company, little tests that you can go back and look at your answers.

And I've also given all of these to people who are feeling just like you. And so you can compare your own responses to the data from the people that I've collected and see where you are relative to other people. So hopefully that will make you feel like you have others who are similar to you, are not alone in this. And also how do you care relative to other people who are experiencing these things? Are you worse off, are you better off and so on?

Well, Tessa, thank you for sharing that. And in this chapter, you have a stage two, which is something that I think people are going to experience on a more regular basis. That is this need in your career to reinvent yourself and you come to this question of what do I want my future career to look like? And I know for a lot of people this can be really daunting because it's as if you're experiencing an identity change because so many of us, let's face it, tie our identity to what we do at work.

If you're a person listening to this and you're facing this in your life, how do you start approaching it? Because it can feel very overwhelming when you reach this point. Yeah, I think that a lot of us have an intuition when we wanna make a career change that we have to start all over, that it's almost like we want to clean slate psychologically.

And so what that means is we're not going to actually try to bring in our old skills to a new job. I think we practically know we're going to do a little bit of that, but the psychological state is clean slate. And I think that's a mistake. I actually, for the identity crisis, I talk a little bit about how it's important to actually go against that intuition and instead start with what you want to actually import from your old career, and it might not be the full experience that you had before, but it's your keeper skills. It's the things that you're actually pretty good at doing.

And I think a lot of us have a hard time breaking down what we do at work in terms of three things. What is the task you do? What is the skill required to execute that task? And then what is the context in which you do it? And if you write down what you're doing at work and you break it down into these kind of three things, task, skill, context, that will then help guide you

in your networking conversations with people. Because if you've identified the specific skill, but you don't like how it's executed, you can ask other people in other careers, I'm really good at say, editing people's papers for me. How could I then execute on that particular task in a new career and get them to break down what they do in terms of tasks, skills, and context? And so once you break it down like

that and you get out of this mindset of, I hate everything, I want to start over, then you can start building a new career around what you want to keep and then exploring new identities and get what I call identity clarity, which isn't necessarily, I want to do this thing, but I know what this thing entails. And here are the skills that I can bring to it. And here's how I would execute on those skills in this particular new career. So it's all about taking a big scary thing and breaking it down into kind of small bite-sized goals, small bite-sized little things that you can do. Little exercises you can work yourself through.

You then bring those things over to those new kind of networking conversations you're having to learn about something new. Then later in this chapter, you go into how to land the new job that you want. And it's actually interesting because you talk about it in this chapter and then in the drifted apart chapter you introduced this concept of framing your skills without overselling your skills. And as I was reading through these it reminded me of this advice that I was given. We often think of a bucket list and the things that we want to achieve in our life going forward and sometimes that can feel overwhelming. And oftentimes what I have done when I'm thinking about the new chapter

and how to frame what I've done is I do a reverse bucket list. I go back and I start looking at all the things that I never thought I could accomplish in my career. And I start going through it because it showcases your adaptability, your ability to take risks and other things. And it tells you all the different things that you've already done.

And I think that is a good way to think about framing your skills without overselling your skills. I wanted to ask your thoughts on it. Yeah, I love that. I think we have this intuition of we need to put our best foot forward and never show any weaknesses in an interview. And because of that, we both like always smile and nod the entire time, but we also use, I don't know, nebulous language. We use overly positive vagaries when we describe what we're actually good at. And this kind of reverse bucket list, it showcases what you've

actually accomplished in a really concrete way, which I think a lot of people don't do. And that can hurt you because it's really hard for organizations to see how an accomplishment in one organization translates to something parallel in another, that it's a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison. So the more concrete you can get, the better. And I also think what I love about that kind of reverse bucket list thing is that it allows you to be creative to seeing connections between your accomplishments. And this is something that a lot of us aren't so great at seeing how we got from here to there. And your own narrative will actually start to develop much more organically if you

do it the way you're describing. Then if people just look at their resume and they look at the last 15 things they've accomplished and then they try to think to themselves, how do I weave all this together to story tell? Sometimes focusing on the things that you were good at that were surprising or unexpected is a better way to do that and adds like a novelty.

So I really liked that idea. I think it gets the concrete nature of those accomplishments is really good. And then perspective taking of how those accomplishments are framed industry-wide. So it's not such an apples to oranges comparison when you're interviewing in a new organization, I think is also a small tip people can take. As I was getting further into this chapter, you have different questions that further into this chapter, you have different questions that a job seeker should ask when they're doing the interview process. And one of them to me jumped out as something that we should all ask if we're going for another job. And that is, what is the most common reasons why a

transitioner like me who's interviewing for this job have failed at this job before? Why is that such an important question to ask? Oh, this is my favorite interview question. Everyone is afraid of asking it because they think that they will look negative. Interviewers for the record, and I've talked to many of them and I did my homework to make sure they're OK with this. They love this question. Losses tend to loom larger than gains.

And most of the people you're speaking with will have some insight into why the last person who took on this role failed at it. In fact, they might have more insight about what they did wrong or structurally wasn't in place for them to succeed than they will about what they did right. In fact, we are much better at giving failure feedback to people than we are giving positive reinforcing feedback.

And I think that's something a lot of us struggle with. It makes feedback hard, but you can embrace that finding that kind of losses loom larger than gains in the context of the interview and get unique insights about all the things no one is telling you that will lead to your potential failure. And some of those are idiosyncratic to the last candidate. Some of them were about mismatches, but often they're about structures of the organization that are hidden from view. Things like the person who oversaw this individual didn't have enough social

capital to actually get them promoted. Or we didn't have a succession plan in place of how to replace that individual when they got promoted. Or one of the more surprising ones is the skills you needed to succeed at this role were different in kind from the skills that you needed to succeed in the last one. And then as an interviewer, you can ask questions around, okay, well, how are you going to prevent that from happening again? What structural changes have you made?

Have you created transparency around status of a manager and their ability to actually get you that promotion? And so you can ask questions around what they have done or what you can do to prevent that from happening again. And it shows that you're thinking about what's going to make you stick in this job. You're thinking about fit. You're not just in impression management mode. You're not just trying to smile and nod and willing to say anything to land the job. You're serious about wanting to keep it in the long term. And I think this is a question I encourage everybody to ask. And then you go into the next section of the book, which you've introduced already, which is the feeling of being drifted apart from one's job.

What are some signs for a listener that may indicate that this is happening and how can individuals start to reconnect with their work or decide to move on? I think the first sign is usually this low-level malaise that the things that used to bring you joy no longer do. And I think for some of us, we really struggle with this hedonic treadmill. We work, we get reinforced, but for some reason, those dopamine bursts are no longer coming. And we're not quite sure what's changed about this place, but we're pretty sure it's a lot of little things. When I ask people to list what's changed, often it's a million things. It's a new boss, it's a new office, it's a new organizational structure. There's a lack of role clarity. I've absorbed someone else's job.

And so the struggle is knowing, is actually knowing exactly what caused that. But there's definitely this sense that the things that used to make you happy here, the same kinds of reinforcements are no longer kind of sparking joy for you. You're just not getting those feelings. And then you start to question how much,

what's it gonna take for me to be happy here? And the answer is I have actually no idea because those same things are no longer bringing those moments of satisfaction like they used to. Yeah, and things are really changing if you think about it. I mean, I remember in the majority of my career, we were all in a work setting and so you had all these people to interact with, et cetera. In today's world, so many people are working from home. You've got more and more people located

in different countries. I think it's harder to actually have those relationships because of the way that things are unfolding. And it makes what you were just discussing even more difficult to achieve in my opinion. Yeah, I think that one real difficulty with being drifted apart is that our intuition is to cause causal is to make causal links, is to say something like there was a merge

or we're now hybrid. And because of that, I no longer connect with people at work, or I no longer love the sort of day-to-day tasks that I do. And often we actually don't know the causal association. We don't know that it is hybrid that has made us feel this way. In the case where all of a sudden you're no longer seeing people and you can feel that, I think it's much simpler. It's much easier to attribute it correctly to the cause. But I think

for most of us, we feel a million changes. And then our instinct is to draw these causal associations. And the people who executed these changes, I studied them for this book, they don't even really understand how those big picture changes like moving to hybrid trickle down to affect people. And the mistake that happens when we assume we understand the causal association between, say, hybrid and being unhappy is that we then look out for a new job that doesn't have that causal thing, that doesn't have hybrid, because we assume that's why we're unhappy. And I think you really want to push people on evidence that they have that is indeed the cause and what other potential things could have led to that. In addition to just trying to understand

how much you've changed, which I think most of us tend to actually underestimate at work. Hybrid work has made people a little bit weird or socially more anxious. And we say we wanna go back to the office, but given the opportunity, many of us actually don't do it,

even though we know it's good for us. And so admitting to yourself that you now have some social anxiety is also an important part of the process or whatever ways in which you've personally changed. I saw something that made me laugh last week. And ever since I was at Dell, we have been trying to get people to work at home more because we just didn't have enough office space. And when I was there, too many people were coming back to work and we couldn't fit them in the offices. And I happened to read that now Delos facing the opposite situation. They have ordered people back to the office. They've actually said

that they could lose their job if they don't. And it was something in the neighborhood of 55 to 75% have said, well, what the heck, fire me then, because I'm not coming back. And they haven't been able to do anything about it because it's so large a component of their workforce, which to me was just so ironic from where we used to be. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. But it's a little bit funny, right? And I think there's a conversation to be had around does threatening employees to come back actually work?

It does not. You have to make them feel FOMO in some way. They have to feel like they're missing out on something. And you're competing against a lot of like at-home creature comforts. But I do think that people often don't know what's good for them. And they often don't realize the importance of those kinds of informal social networking conversations they have at work for promoting them, for learning the hierarchy, for all of these kinds of

juicy, psychological, interpersonal things that make us happy at work. And they underestimate the value of those to their own happiness. So folks go back to the office if you can have as many informal lunches as you can. You will feel better at the end of the day when you do this and you'll actually move ahead much more quickly. No, I think it's great advice, and I can't imagine being with a large company and not having those interactions because that's where I found you built so much commonality in bonds, especially if you were like me in the IT group, and you're trying to build strength with your business relationships, business customers,

it's almost impossible to do that over a Zoom call or a phone call. Yeah. Well, Tessa, I want to jump to the runner-up phenomenon. And for someone who's listening, this is where you feel like you're coming in second for promotions or opportunities. And this is really quite common. It's happened to me. I remember when I was at Lowe's, we had this major shift, Cornferry came in and took us from five director ports to the CIO to 12,

and then structure underneath those 12. And I remember I really wanted this job and I went to my boss because I felt like I was the runner up for it. And it was interesting. He told me the person who got the job, it was the only job that this person could do. And he said to me, you could do any of the 12 jobs. So I ended up putting them there first because it's the only job they could do. And I asked them, but could they do the job better than me? And, but I think that this is something that a lot of people run into. How can someone break out of this cycle and start achieving the career goals

that they aspire to have? Wow. I've actually never heard a runner-up get passed over because someone else could only do this job and they didn't want to lay them off. That is fascinating. I think, yes, it's incredibly common. Let me tell everyone who's listening that if you don't really know why you're a runner-up, you are in the majority. A very small percentage of the people that I studied were ever explicitly told why they

were passed up, like 13% of people or something like that. So I think our instinct is often to get mad, to get bitter, and then to look for that promotion elsewhere. But I think the first step you need to take is actually understanding what the underlying reason is. And sometimes that is something that's a little bit painful to process, like having less status than you think you do. Often there's been what's called a status jolt in the workplace, an organizational shift where you've lost your social capital and you haven't quite figured out how to gain it back. But almost always the answer is that there's something missing either from your past history, some past role or

experience that isn't even recent. This is something maybe three roles back, three experiences back, that some decision maker is like gonna die on that hill of the person has to have that thing. And no one's really told you that you need that thing because it hasn't been super relevant to get to where you are now, but it's somehow as relevant for the next step up.

So I think understanding doing a little detective work to figure out what is missing from my resume. I think the other kind of piece that you need to get to the bottom of is who am I actually being compared to? I think most of us cling to a social comparison other who's the person who at our company got the job above us or the person next to us, but knowing who is actually in the top 10 over and over again and what their resumes look like. So we actually understand who we're being compared to is important. And then understanding sort of the trajectory of how many times it takes to actually get

promoted. And sometimes I talk about the promotion pipeline or the failure pipeline, this idea that for a lot of jobs, it takes three or four attempts to actually get it, but most of us feel bad if we don't get it after one or two. So this is all about just playing detective work to understand why you're here instead of feeling bad and then jumping into a new situation. And that takes a lot of kind of pulling data out of people from HR, from your boss, asking to look not just at the last person who was promoted, but the last say 10 or so who are seriously considered, and closing that gap between why you think

you are failing to get promoted and why you actually are failing. And leaders, by the way, are not much better. About 35% of the people I studied said they ever explicitly told a person why they weren't promoted. So we're just in the dark about this. And I think this detective work is a really important first step that most of us don't do when we're going through this experience.

Thank you, Tessa, for that. I wanna jump to chapter three of your book where you describe the stretched tooth thin aspect of work. And I love how you introduced this chapter. You're right, I'm everywhere all at once and the juggle isn't sustainable. And where I wanna go with you on this is I recently recorded a solo episode this past week on

the busyness trap. Because I feel like so many people today are experiencing what Henry David Thoreau said is quiet desperation. And it's because we put ourselves in these situations where we think being busy means we're being productive when in fact it's oftentimes the inverse of that Where do you think being stretched too thin? Equates to people falling into the business trap and how do they break out of it? When you are doing multiple roles at work, which is everyone right now

I think the average person has like five or six roles, you often fall into this trap of doing work that is visible. So a person in power can see you doing it and it gives you name recognition and you think it gives you status, but it doesn't actually showcase performance on the dimensions that really matter for promotion or for

moving forward. So I think a lot of the busy work we do is work that makes us feel good, gives us visibility with people in power, so running committees, running employee resource groups, taking on the the job of a team member in need. Things that give us lots of hats on the back, lots of nice Slack messages and emails, and they make us well-liked, but they are not the same things. Our performance on those things are not brought into the conversations

that leaders have about promotion. And I think most of us fall into this busyness trap when we take on those roles, those tasks that give us visibility. We think they're giving us status, but they actually don't, and they make us well-liked. And be very cautious about helping out team members who are getting paid to do the job you're doing or volunteering too much for these kind of highly visible roles or tasks.

Because at the end of the day, you want to ask your boss, is my performance on this particular thing going to come up in a promotion conversation, not is it going to get me a promotion? Is this something that's going to give me a good reputation? But will it even come up? And I think if you ask that question and you get, we've never actually talked about whether someone ran an employee resource group when we're deciding who we want to make the next manager, but we still really appreciate your work here.

That's the answer to your question. Then do these things if they're fun, but they're probably actually basically amounting to busy work. Next, I want to talk about my favorite chapter in the book because I'm in this chapter. It's called The Unappreciated Star. And you define this as I'm underpaid and undervalued

compared to what I bring into the workplace. And I want to jump to my section of this chapter where you highlight the importance of risk-taking and feature my experience in this section about the underappreciated star. How do you think the tolerance for risk-taking has influenced different people's career trajectories and what advice would you give to those who struggle

with getting out of their comfort zones? Yeah, I think you taught me that people are risk-averse and often the more senior they get, the more risk-averse they are. There is a fear, and this is something that you're going to need to grapple with and admit to yourself that you have, that you will no longer be the best person in the room, the highest status person in the room, the most respected person in the room, should you take a leap? And I think our tolerance for risk in some ways is actually pretty high because a lot of us jump from job to job, frying pan to frying pan. But in other ways, it's really low when it comes to those psychological dimensions of

fear of not being an expert at something, of not having that status. And I think for people who are underappreciated stars, who are used to being the best in the room, the biggest fish in the small pond, it's that fear of losing those things that make them feel good about themselves, that are really actually holding them back. And I think this tolerance for risk is something we talk about early on in our career, but we lose the narrative as we gain expertise. And I think keeping that muscle alive and having a tolerance for risk when you're mid-career, even late career is super important. I think you can mitigate that risk fear if you ask questions during the interview, like the one we talked about earlier. What are all the ways in which I can fail at this job?

Because fundamentally, that's where that fear is coming from. So if you can learn about failure, you can learn to prevent it, then I think you can actually have a little bit more tolerance for risk later on in your career. But you have to ask those questions that are going to actually get you to that place where you're comfortable enough with the risk. But I do think this is something that is absolutely essential that a lot of us later on as we become experts don't have. I just want to add some of my own background on this since you and I discussed this in

an interview. For me, I'll go back to my role at Lowe's. And before we had that big shift that I talked about where I got placed into a job that wasn't my first choice, I'd gone through this extensive interview process that Korn Ferrier was doing with a bunch of psychologists that they brought in to evaluate us. And in my end session, the person who was the lead psychologist did this outgoing session with me and in it she said, John, you've had this incredible career up to this point. But in the words of Marshall Goldsmith, what got you here isn't going to get you to where you want to go.

And she was talking about what you're referring to here is up into this point, I had been this shining star and I had been able to really go into these jobs and outperform everyone else. But I was reaching a point as I was getting more senior that I was going to find that there were more people who were operating at my level and some who were going to be much better than me. And mentally, I wasn't really equipped to handle that yet. And when you start facing that situation as I did, when I went to Dell

and you find out, man, there's of all the VPs here, I'm average walking in, you in your mind want to stop taking those risks because you think that if you do, these others are going to pass you over and their capabilities. But what I quickly realized is if you don't continue to take the risks and don't continue to put yourself out there, I feel like I wasn't going to gain the respect of others. I wasn't going to continue learning and growing

in the way that I had up into that point where I was almost like fearless about taking on more responsibility. Do you think what I experienced is pretty common? I think it's super common. And I think people are a little bit ashamed to admit that they don't want to not be the best person in the room. And I think we experienced this with runners up where when you go for

promotions and you're not getting them, that self-esteem hit is enough to make you just kind of retreat back to your old role where it was comfortable and people respected you, reminding yourself that you're competing against the right people if you are losing. That if you're always picked, then you're probably competing against people who are not at the same level as you, and that's not going to actually help you get better. We see this with sports. I have an 11 year old son in baseball.

He is always on the team of the older kids, opposite of red shirting, in an attempt to just show him that you need to up your social comparisons in order to up your game. I think the main thing is knowing the right kind of risk. And I think not all forms of risk are created equal. And for people who are stars, a lot of that comes down to the scaffolding and the structure of the organization.

Are they going to give you the things that you would need to succeed in this role? Or is this going to be a bit of a glass cliff? They're going to put you into this role and they're going to use language like you're going to build the plane as you fly it. That to me are some red flags that they haven't thought about the structure and support you would need to succeed. And you want to make sure those things are taken care of. The psychological fears around status loss, around not being the best person, those are on you to work through. The structural things, those are on the organization to prove that those forms of risk are actually

going to be mitigated and handled. Thank you again for that Tessa. And I want to close today's interview with asking you a couple final questions about the recruitment process. Your research involved interviewing over 1500 professional recruiters. What were some of the most surprising insights you gained about what recruiters look like or what they look for in candidates? I think one of the most surprising things is that the process of recruiting and the process of creating a wide funnel,

so getting as many people as you can to apply for a job, is not meant to actually help the job candidate land a job. It is meant to get them, it is many kind of candidates at the start and in the end. So many of them actually get paid by the degree to which they're able to get that funnel smaller over time. That to me was insight that you should not be applying for a million jobs, that hitting the easy apply button is something that often hurts candidates because you're probably not going to get looked at by doing that. I think some of the main mistakes people are making in terms of what's actually on their resumes that almost every recruiter or hiring manager told me is that they

don't let the parts of their resume talk to each other. And so by that, I mean, they're motivated to list out as many accomplishments, as many roles as they have. So the kind of more is more approach that they don't integrate these things. They don't say how three different roles they held in an organization were actually overlapping roles with overlapping jobs. They're afraid of doing this because they want to look like they can do a million things at once. This kind of busyness problem that we talked about. But what organizations are actually looking for is your ability to integrate these different

roles for you to say how my role is a hiring manager was related to my role as running a conference for recruiters, what tasks were overlapping between them and how was I able to create working spheres around those things so that I wasn't doing the same thing twice. So allowing your roles to talk to each other. When you have outcomes that are related to performance, hard outcomes, you need to situate those broadly. And so don't say things like, I contributed to 30% of the revenue

for this organization or for my team. Nobody knows what that means. And if they're a bigger organization, they're not going to know what that means. So framing things really broadly in universal language and connecting the dots for the resume reader so they don't have to figure out with 30% means, 30% of what and what was the goal. That's a lot of kind of perspective taking. So let your

roles talk to each other. Do not have a bunch of things that say 2014 through present. That will get you eliminated at first round on that kind of recruiters creating that Boolean search or those search terms within LinkedIn or recruiter or whatever. have those roles talking to each other. So it doesn't look like you're doing 15 separate things at one time and framing those accomplishments broadly. And if you speak multiple languages, put that on your resume.

A lot of people don't, and that's something that a lot of companies value. And in the recruitment process, I wanted to talk about something that I think is extremely important, which is the role of company culture. Because as I look at disengagement right now, I think there's a complete and utter correlation between the culture that you work in and why people are disengaged or why they're not disengaged. And I remember when I was earlier in my career, one of my peers and I were talking about employees and it was during the ranking process and he had this chart that I started to use after it. And on one side he had how well they were doing their job or the ability to understand new skills.

And then on the other quadrant, he had ability to adapt into company culture. And he used to tell me all the time, it doesn't matter how good they are at doing their job, if they can't equate to the culture of the company, they're never going to be happy. They're always going to be dissatisfied. And therefore, there's nothing that you can do in giving them new skills that's going to make them feel like they're around shape going into around whole, they're always going to feel like they're a square. In your opinion, as you're assessing a job before accepting it, how do you go about understanding a company's culture because it can be difficult? I think this is the million dollar question. I think that the best way of doing this is to set up

15 minute chats with as many people who work for the relevant parts of the organization as possible. And so often we go through the interview process, the only people we interface with are various hiring managers. When you get far along enough into the interview process, second, third round for some organizations, that's when you need to start talking to team members who are currently working there When you get far along enough into the interview process, second, third round for some organizations,

that's when you need to start talking to team members who are currently working there and potentially people who used to work there and no longer do. So people who are in the company in various roles, they don't necessarily need to be in your own, who have some sort of hidden curriculum that they can share. They can tell you about those implicit norms of the company. And I think a lot of us take jobs without ever talking to current team members, potential team members. We only talk to the hires.

And I think that's a huge mistake. I know when I interview graduate students at NYU from my lab, the first thing I tell them to do is to set up meetings with current and past people from my lab to get a sense of the culture. As many people as possible, you're looking for a sort of common theme, shared understanding. You don't just want the one person who got laid off, who had a bad experience, and you want to organize those conversations around people who have reported to the boss that you would report to, or people who are in parallel roles. And I think you can go on to company websites.

You can actually ask hiring managers relevant names of team members to talk to. And I think a lot of recruiters I spoke with said people get this wrong because they reach out to the wrong people, but most hiring managers will actually give you a list of relevant people to reach out to. And then you can do what we call snowball sampling

from there, ask those people other connections they have have just to get a sense of the culture. And the only way that you're going to get a sense of this is by talking to as many people as you can, but just a couple of 15-minute conversations. In those conversations, my favorite question to ask people is simple. Before I started this job, nobody told me that. And get their experiences that are often off the radar and not shared. Some of the things that are not advertised about the job

or about the company culture. That simple question will give you a wide variety of interesting answers and look to those answers to build your understanding of what the culture is actually like. Okay, and then finally, Tessa, what do you hope readers will take away from job therapy and how do you envision it helping them in their professional lives?

I want readers to feel like if they're unhappy and they're angsty and they're ambivalent and they're feeling all these conflicting emotions, that you are in good company. This is the normal experience of a career goer these days. And if you just follow these steps of collecting some data on yourself, of understanding where you are, these are solvable problems. I think there are solutions to these things.

There are concrete actions we can take. There are small things that we can do a little bit differently to increase our chance of finding something that fits. But as you go through this process, I just want to remind readers that this isn't a quick fix. These are processes that take some time, digging in and figuring out your starting place and networking with people.

These are things that you can all do while you're still employed at your old job. So none of the things I ask you to do take more than five or 10 minutes, but they do take some careful planning and they do take some courage to ask some difficult questions. Hopefully with the guides I've given and some of the quizzes and little tools that I put together in this book, these big scary goals can be broken down into bite-sized ones and you can find something that will fit you in a much better way for the long term. I love it, applying behavior science to job therapy. So I'm going to put up the book one more time, job therapy, finding work that works

for you, please go out and buy this. I will have it on the website. Use that link. It'll take you right to Amazon and to more information about Tessa. Well, before we end, where's the best place if people don't go to my personal website for them to learn more about you? You can go to TessaWestAuthor.com and on there you will find links to the book and also links to different quizzes, including the ones from Jerks at Work and from Job Therapy. If you want to learn about my research, you can go to TessaWestLab.com.

Well, Tessa, it was such an honor to have you today. And thank you for including me in this great book. That was quite an honor itself. Thank you so much for having me. What an incredible honor that was to interview my friend Dr. Tessa West. And I wanted to thank Penguin Random House, Jay Van Babel, and Tessa for the honor and privilege of joining me on today's show. Links to all things Tessa will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.

Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Links to all things Tessa will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our clips channel at passion struck clips. Please go subscribe and join over a quarter million other subscribers who tune in weekly. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you want daily doses of inspiration, then join me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles. And if you want to sign up for our courage challenge, then join our weekly newsletter titled live intentionally, where we carefully curate a weekly challenge that goes along with the episodes that we do. Are you curious to find out where you stand

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Just head over to passionstruck.com today. You're about to hear a preview of the passion struck podcast interview that I did with the brilliant Johan Hari, a renowned author of three New York times bestsellers whose work has captivated millions and been celebrated by luminaries such as Oprah and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this episode, Johan dives deep into his latest book, magic pill, the extraordinary benefits and the disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. After experiencing significant weight loss with Ozempic, Johan embarked on a one-year investigative journey

into the new pharmaceuticals, revolutionizing our approach to obesity and to weight management. Between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity doubled in the United States, and then in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again, right? Staggering has never happened in the history of the human species. What's going on there? I wanted to understand how did this happen. And I also

wanted to understand how these drugs work. Obesity rises everywhere in the world where one change happens. It's not where people develop weak willpower. It's not where people are just greedy pigs and all the other mean, cruel, stigmatizing things. It's where one change happens. Wherever people move from mostly eating fresh whole foods that they prepared that day to mostly eating processed or ultra processed foods, wherever that change happens, obesity skyrockets. One of the key reasons is this new kind of food, which has never existed before before profoundly undermines our ability to know when we're full and to stop. Remember that we rise by lifting others so share this show with those that you love and care about and if you found today's episode useful then definitely consider

sharing it with your friends and families. In the meantime do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time go go out there and become passion-struck.