Something You Should Know - Why So Many People Are Unhappy at Work & A Better Way to Make Financial Decisions

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

How do you get top dollar when you sell on eBay? Well of course you need good photos and a great description but it turns out some of the specific words in that description can really raise or lower the amount people will pay. I begin this episode with an explanation of that. (http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/money/a38347/how-to-make-money-on-ebay/) Workers improve when they get feedback. A company’s culture is the key to success. Good leadership is what makes a company thrive. Although you may believe these assumptions to be true, there is some good evidence they are not. Marcus Buckingham has studied people and performance for a long time and he joins me to explode some commonly held beliefs about workers and the workplace. Marcus’ new book is called Nine Lies About Work (https://amzn.to/2HlAkdW). If you work for a living and want to grow in your career, you need to hear this. Have you ever cracked an egg open and seen a little spot of what looks like blood inside? Is it safe to eat? I’ll explain what the food experts say about where that little spot of red comes from and just harmful it is. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-stir/egg-facts_b_2498764.html) Decisions about money always seem to be complicated. In part that is because we have so many financial decisions to make and there is a lot of emotion wrapped up in money. Amanda Clayman comes on the podcast as my guest to discuss how we make financial decisions, why it is hard and how to make better decisions with our money. Amanda is a financial therapist and a financial wellness advocate for Prudential. Her website is www.AmandaClayman.com This Week's Sponsors -Capterra. To discover the best software for your business - for free - go to www.Capterra.com/something -Linzess. For information about your IBSC symptoms go to www.ohmygut.info/podcast. -Capital One. What's in your wallet? www.CapitalOne.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know... If you sell items on eBay, there's a way to improve your chances of getting top dollar. Then, how employers create great employees. And it's not about giving them feedback. You don't remediate your way to excellence. You want to get Mike to excel, you see where he's currently really good, and you help him to understand it and recreate it and refine it. And the whole feedback movement unfortunately misses that. Then ever crack an egg open and see what looks like a little spot of blood? Should you still eat it? And why do people have such a hard time making good financial decisions? Because they have all of these draining

experiences when they are interacting with money, they really think of this process as sort of a tool of no, as opposed to thinking about it as a tool of yes. What is it that we want to say yes to in our financial life? All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about.

And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion,

embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. Do you sell stuff on eBay? I do, a little. My wife does it more than I do. And it's fun. I like it. It's fun to watch when people start to bid and see how high up the bids go and all.

And I know that when people sell things on eBay, typically a lot of attention is put on the pictures and writing a good description. But how you write that description really can make a difference in how much money you make. Researchers at the Birmingham City University in England looked through 68,000 items listed on eBay to see how sellers described their products and how that impacted the final selling price. The study showed that men's watches sold for an average of $43, while

gents' watches went for $100. Additionally, genuine fragrances fetched $30, while authentic fragrances earned $49. Similarly, buyers paid nearly three times as much for on-ear headphones, $102, than in-ear headphones, $36. Meanwhile, watches described as having resistance earned nearly 50% more than watches described with the word resistant. Researchers also noted that grammatical errors such as missing apostrophes and internet slang had a negative effect on the price people paid for products on eBay.

And that is something you should know. You don't have to look too far to find some expert who is willing to explain their vision on how to make workers and the workplace better. It's a multi-million dollar industry of consultants and books and seminars and podcasts on making employees more engaged and making managers better leaders. But here's the thing. Nothing really changes much. Most people are not happy in their job, and that has been true for years, if not decades. So, with all these consultants and experts, why hasn't somebody fixed the problem, or at least made a dent in it?

Why aren't more people thrilled and delighted to go to work every day? Well, maybe, maybe the whole premise is wrong. The idea that to get more people engaged in their work is to give better feedback or create a better work culture or improve leadership skills of managers. What if all of that stuff is baloney? Well, that's just what Marcus Buckingham thinks. For years, he's been researching the topic of people and performance, and he's written extensively about it.

His new book is called Nine Lies About Work. And there's something he says at the end of this interview that you're about to hear, because as I record this piece of the podcast, I've already done the interview, I've already heard it, and there's something he said at the end that I want to pull right up here to the front because, well, I remember Journalism 101, don't bury the lead. And I think this clip is the lead. It is the premise for everything he is about to say about why so many of us are unhappy at work. Listen. Human uniqueness at work is on some level annoying for the companies or organizations Listen.

So remember that as you listen to this interview with Marcus Buckingham. Hi, Marcus. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Mike. So there are a lot of theories, and a lot of people agree on many of these theories about what it takes to create an engaging workplace and what the culture should be and all this stuff. So what are you saying

differently? We ought to start with what's knowable, not with what's theoretical, but what's knowable. So let's just start with what's knowable about productivity and engagement at work. Well, per person productivity since 1973 in the US and in the UK and Germany, it's a global phenomenon. And the growth per-person productivity has been anemic. At the US right now, it's less than 1% per year, which given the amount of money and technology and process improvement that we've thrown at that problem for the last 50 years, you'd have thought we would have seen a spike in per-person productivity. We haven't. We're barely shifting at all. Global engagement, same thing. Global engagement right now,

I run the ADP Research Institute. We just finished this 19-country study. The overall summary of the data findings is that between 15% and 16% of people are fully engaged at work, and everyone else is just coming to work. For everyone else, it's just a transaction, which is okay. It's not a bad transaction. You sell your time and your talent, and you get money, and you go live your life. But obviously, for many of us, 40% of our time is spent at work. It could be something so much more than that. And of course, our companies and our customers want it to be so much more than that for us. They don't want to encounter people that are just putting in the hours. So at the moment, the data would say, whatever we're doing at work isn't working

anymore. The macroeconomists that look at this data say the improvements and technological advancements that we've applied the last 100 years are no longer giving us any lift. So where do we stand right now? We stand at a point where we're not moving our per person productivity numbers and our engagement numbers are stuck in the cellar. So whatever we're doing right now isn't working. So let's talk about that in the context of some of the lies that you write about. And the first one you write about is that people care which company they work for. And you say that's a lie. If people cared which company they work for, and obviously we read about this in the press, that one company has one culture, and the culture of Tesla is like this, and the

culture of Patagonia is like that, and then we read the Fortune 100 best companies to work for list, and it's all about each company's got this definable culture, and everybody who works for that particular company needs to understand the culture. We train them in orientation classes about the culture. We talk about our myths around what that culture is like. And supposedly the best companies are the ones with the best cultures. Well, if that's true, and of course, that's a pretty coercive thing to say to people, you come join this company and we all are supposed to behave and act in the same way. That's what a culture is supposed to be. It's supposed to create uniformity of behavior. You actually start measuring that and say, okay, well, let's go

find that thing called culture. We ought to be able to find two things, Mike. One is that if you go to measure culture at, say, Tesla, we ought to find that there are some things we can ask people who work for Tesla that are measurably different when we ask the same questions of the people at, say, Goldman Sachs. Questions about values or mission or future or confidence or relationships or recognition, whatever it is, we should be able to ask a set of questions at Tesla that ask these things and that say, look, Tesla's culture is different from the measurements of those same questions at Goldman Sachs. And we also ought to be able to find that within Tesla, there is uniformity. So it doesn't really matter which

particular department or division or location of Tesla we're asking these questions. There is a Tesla-ness. And we can measure the Tesla-ness. And it's different than the Goldman Sachs-ness. We should be able to see that if all this stuff about culture is true. But we can't find that. We can never find that. Culture doesn't exist. This whole Tesla-ness is a fiction. There's no way to measure this thing called culture. What we find, actually, when we go in and start asking pretty basic questions about confidence in the future or belief in the mission or clarity of expectations, I mean, really basic questions. What you find is that the people's answers to those questions vary

significantly inside a company and that there's more variance on those questions actually inside a company than between companies. And along with that, you find that voluntary turnover, which is a pretty good measure of whether you care about where you work for, like do you care about it enough to actually stay there, voluntary turnover varies significantly inside the same company as well. So what that means is that although you might care which company you join, once you're there, how long you stay and how productive and how engaged you are while you're there depends massively on which team you're on. The team you're on is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience, your lived experience at work. People don't care which company they work for.

They care which team they're on. And the thing that they leave when they leave something isn't a company. It's a team. I remember, though, several years ago when Google was the up-and-coming great company to work for. And there were stories in the media about it. And you'd see images of all the free food that they would give away at lunch. And, you know, if you wanted to, you could lie on the floor and do your work or sit on the couch or, you know, play ping pong. And that this was the Google culture

that people thought would be so cool to work in. We describe this as peacock feathers for people. That's just cultural plumage. It's all just a recruiting manual. It's not real. It's not really designed to get you to join. So all of that stuff is about talent acquisition. We want to lure the best people into Google. But you go work for Google, and by measure, I just mean ask people questions.

Just ask them simple questions about, do you know what's expected of you? Do you trust your manager? Do you feel like if you did excellent work, you'd be recognized for it? Do you feel like someone cares about your development? I mean, just very simple, one-sentence questions. And you find, at Google, massive range at Google. Well, what does that mean then? The place in which the similarity occurs or does not is the team itself. So the variation,

the experience of what you have at your work is significantly affected by the six or seven people that work on that team with you, or maybe it's two teams. 65% of people work on more than one team at work. So it's a combination of teams. The stuff at Google looks great in an ad or looks great in a picture in a magazine, but it's not real. And we should stop pretending or telling us some stories about stuff at work that when you look at how many people actually leave Google and is there a variation in who leaves most? And when you do that, you find, yes, of course there is. And some teams seem to be pushing people out the door all the time, whereas other teams really keep their talent. And that varies inside Google, not between Google and Facebook. So all you can do as a CEO of a company is you can try to build lots and lots of teams like your best teams.

So all this talk of culture is weirdly missing the point. So one of the lies that you write about that I really want to talk about is that people need feedback, which you say is a lie. People don't need feedback. But that is so ingrained in business that the way you get better and the way the company improves is that your manager goes over your work with you and tells you what you've done right and tells you what you've done wrong and what you need to work on. Yes. And when you push on that, you actually discover that people don't need feedback. And what we're talking about with feedback here is critical feedback. I need to tell you what you did wrong, how you can do it right,

because if I didn't tell you, you wouldn't know and you wouldn't get better. Do people actually grow most in response to somebody telling you, here's what you did truthfully, I am the source of truth of you, and here's what you should do to make it better? Well, when push comes to shove, we know the brain doesn't grow that way. My brain does not grow and get better by trying to acquire the patterns or behaviors that you have in yours. We grow most not in response to feedback of someone telling us, well, this is how I would do it. We actually grow most in response to attention. No question the data is clear. If you want to destroy someone's productivity, just ignore them. So yes, unquestionably, people want attention from other human beings. We grow most in response to another

human being's attention. The question then is, well, what kind of attention? And again, with that question, the data shows us that you grow more synaptic connections in your brain, in the parts of your brain where you have the most pre-existing synaptic connections. So growth for you, Mike, is your brain becoming an increasingly refined and effective version of itself. Your growth isn't turning your brain into my brain. And so if I wanted to help you grow and get better, the best thing I could do for you is to pay attention to your work and particularly draw your attention to what works about your work. When did people lean in? When did that really soar? When did you persuade someone to do what they didn't intend to do? When did you write something that people wanted to read?

If I can help you see where your activities or situations or contexts really work, then you and I together can figure out ways to refine that or improve that or repeat that. That's growth for you. Now, of course, if you get a step wrong or a fact wrong, then of course, right there, giving you feedback that that step was wrong or that fact was wrong, that's entirely fine. I absolutely should do that. But that gets you to zero. And the whole process of going from zero to infinity in terms of your performance is an entirely different journey. As any parent or any great teacher or any coach knows, you don't remediate your way to excellence. If you want to get Mike to excel, you see where he's currently really good and you help him to understand it and recreate it and refine it. The raw material of anyone's future greatness is their current goodness,

and the whole feedback movement today unfortunately misses that. I'm speaking with Marcus Buckingham. He's recently written a book that's going to shake up the world of work, employment, and leadership. The name of the book is Nine Lies About Work. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Pantwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator join me as i study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving god and we are not its favorite children the heresies of redolf bantwine wherever podcasts are available. So, Marcus, for as long as I can remember, there's always been this sense that positive feedback in the form of praise, that praise is really powerful in helping people be better on the job, right?

I mean, it's a funny thing, Mike. We think that praise, like we think that good job, good job, good job, Mike. We think that's the end of a sentence or the end of a thought. Good job. And then we move on. Good job. But in fact, we've got the best coaches and managers and team leaders realize good job is the beginning of a sentence. Okay, good job, Mike.

What worked there? Why did it work? Have you figured out what it was that made that particular segment so freaking powerful? Do you know what that is? Do you know why? That's a really interesting, not to praise you, but to interrogate you. But the best team leaders seem to realize you interrogate around current goodness because that's the raw material for the future. And it's just a different, it's a whole different journey and mechanism. And right now, we have fallen in love. We have a fetish for feedback, as though we are the source of truth about you.

And if we keep telling you, even with the best of intentions, what's wrong and what you should do differently, that somehow you're going to get better. And yet, all the data shows us that that's not true at all. We hear a lot in the workplace about potential and the importance of developing people's potential, but one of your lies is that people have potential. So explain that. Well, again, it goes back to the measurement thing. So if you go work in a company right now, there's a deep assumption that there is a thing called potential, and some people have a bucket with lots of potential in it, and we have a name for them. We call them high potentials. Most every organization has a high potential program

because the CEO will turn to the chief human resources person at some point and say, well, who's our best talent? Are we investing in our best talent? Are we keeping our best talent? And so we build these high potential programs. And if you're designated a high potential, that's pretty good. You get lots of goodies. You get a little more money. You get more training, more development, more opportunities, maybe a

coach or a mentor. Why? Because you're a hypo. And this high potential substance, somehow, no matter what job you're in, no matter what the context of the job you're in, this high potential designation of yours somehow turbocharges you to greater growth and development. And then there's other people in the company who've also got a bucket, but they don't have as much, quote, potential in it. And these people are low-pos or no-pos. And at the moment, the percentage is about 18%, 19% of people are designated high potentials in companies. And the rest of us are just, I don't know, we're just low-pos. And I guess that's an okay idea. If you thought that you wanted to maximize your return on investment, you should probably invest more in people with

a multiplying substance called potential. But again, you go in and you try to measure potential. You try to measure in a human being a personality characteristic that regardless of what job they were in or what context they were in, just turbocharged them, like Willy Wonka's golden ticket or something. Just try and measure that, find that anywhere, and you can't. That doesn't exist. There is not such a thing as a person with lots of potential and a person with no potential. That's just not real. That's made up. Even though it's how we actually build our entire approaches to people and companies, it's made up. The truth of the matter, of course, is that everyone can grow. Everyone can get better. We're just going to grow differently, different speeds, different directions.

Each one of us has momentum, and you can talk to someone about, well, what's your momentum right now, Mike? What's your speed and what's your direction of that momentum? Do you want to speed it up? Do you want to change its direction? Momentum is a really good word to talk about with you because that's, again, that's the start of a conversation and you, Mike, can control it. But if I have something called potential, that's an end of a conversation. You've either got potential, apparently, or you don't. And if you look at our companies today, that's a deeply held assumption from which a lot of tools and practices and careers are mediated. And it's just flat out wrong. Everyone can grow.

There is a whole movement in business today about work-life balance. That is the thing, that if you have work-life balance, you're magical. And yet one of your lies is that work-life balance. That is the thing, that if you have work-life balance, you're magical. And yet, one of your lies is that work-life balance matters. First of all, who's ever found that balance? I mean, who's ever found that moment where the kids are fine and work is fine and the bank account's fine? And it's a static state to be in balance. You look at the healthiest, most effective people, and they're moving. They're moving through life, of which, by the way, work is a part. So work-life balance is an odd thing because actually there's life and there's work, and work is part of life. Like, kids are part of life. Community is part of life. Faith is part of life. Family is part of life.

There's just life. We've got the categories wrong, Mike. We've got work and life as two fake categories, and then we say balance them. Well, in fact, the categories wrong, Mike. We've got work and life as two fake categories, and then we say balance them. Well, in fact, the categories should be, what do you love? What do you loathe? In the course of all aspects of your life, there are situations and contexts and people that you lean into, that invigorate you, that you love. And there are other situations or contexts or people, whether at work or as a father or as a friend or as a community member, there are certain other things that you load, that you lean away from, that drain you. And they're different for every person. Your loves and loves are different than mine.

But if we get the categories right, the categories would be love and love. And the advice would be, don't strive for balance. No, no, no. Do what the most successful people do and intentionally imbalance your life toward more loves and less loads in every aspect of your life. You start advocating to people to do that. Even at 11 years old in school, kids can figure that out. You start going, what do you love about school? Which aspects of it? Which classes?

Which teachers? How do you learn best? You start doing that at 11. You start giving them a discipline for life that says, you know what? Life is set up, if you had but eyes to see it, is set up to show you which aspects, situations, contexts, and people invigorate you. Then pay attention to that and deliberately, if you can, tilt your life, imbalance your life towards that. The Mayo Clinic has done a bunch of research on doctors around this because so many doctors are burning out. And 73% of doctors would not advocate to their kids to be doctors because the job is so dispiriting. And what they found is if you have 20% of your life as a doctor doing activities that you love, just 20%.

For each percentage point lower than that that you get, 18, 17, 16, there is a commensurate 1% increase in your likelihood to burn out. It's a linear relationship, 15, 14. Each percentage of loving what you do goes down, your burnout risk goes up. But what's interesting is above 20%, if you start filling your job with 25, 30% of activities that you love, there's no commensurate increase in your likelihood to be resilient. So it's almost as like what the Mayo Clinic is finding is that in your job, a little love goes a long way. You don't necessarily have to, quote, do what you love. That's almost impossible. But you could find love in what you do. And it clearly when the best,

the best doctors deliberately find specific things about their work that they love. And when they do 20% of their time is spent on those, they don't suffer from the same awful burnout that's currently afflicting most doctors. Perhaps your most intriguing lie is the one where you say it's a lie that leadership is a thing. Because again, this is a big industry that if only we had better leaders, things would be so much better. Yeah, it's a $15 billion industry here in the US alone. Well, again, you go to what's measurable and you say, okay, well, let's just take 15 really good leaders and put them up against a wall. And we'll try and measure their personalities and see whether or not they have anything in common, any attributes, any traits, any competencies.

And of course, what you find is that all of those leaders are different. And so, and you keep doing that again and again. We've tried to do this for the last hundred years. Can we find what all good leaders have in common? And when it comes to traits or attributes, the answer is no. Every single really effective leader in the world seems to be different, which means that this list of traits, every one of them is optional. Well, if every one of the list of traits of leadership is optional, then it's a useless set of traits. There's only one thing that all good leaders have in common, and that's followers. Followership is a thing. If you turn around as a leader and you've got no one following you,

then you're not a leader. So a leader is one of those jobs that's defined by whether or not somebody else is choosing to give their breath and their drive to the picture of the future you've painted. Well, we can measure followership. We can ask people all sorts of questions about whether or not you choose to follow Mike. And if there's a bunch of people that say yes, well, that's a thing. Now, Mike isn't the same as every other leader. Every leader is different. But the question we should be asking isn't what do all leaders have in common so that we can uncover this thing called leadership. The question should be, what do all followers feel about the many different varieties of leaders that they follow? What is followership? And then you turn to each leader and say, what is your way

of creating these particular feelings and followers? We've got the equation backwards. There's no such thing as leadership. There is such a thing as followership. We can understand it, we can measure it, and then we can help other leaders build it. But each leader is going to build it differently. And we only have to look at the leaders that we've encountered in our lives, the good ones, to see just how idiosyncratic excellence is when you look at leaders. Well, it's a really interesting topic that just kind of breaks this mold that everybody's just assumed that all these things are true and have operated on that assumption that

all these things are true. And it's interesting to have someone say, well, wait a minute, the assumptions are wrong. Yeah. When you really push on these nine lies, what you bump into in the end is that all of the lies are pushed at us because they're trying to eradicate human uniqueness. Human uniqueness at work is on some level annoying for the companies or organizations that are employing the humans. Henry Ford once said, why is it whenever I want a pair of hands, I get a human being

as well? And although he said that 100 years ago or more, we've still built most of our, including our well-intended people systems around the idea that human uniqueness is annoying. We want all of our leaders to be the same, all of our salespeople, all of our nurses. We build competencies and measure people against them and tell them to get feedback so they can closely adhere to the model. And all of it, when you push on it, you realize, oh my gosh, all of it is basically looking at human uniqueness as a bug. And yet, when you look at teams, you realize the best team leaders have figured out it's not a bug.

Human uniqueness is a feature. And in fact, the way that we use that feature, and we figured out this 50,000 years ago, is you build a team. A team is the best way to make the most of the fact that human beings are enduringly different. The team, therefore, becomes well-rounded precisely because each human in it isn't. That is such an interesting perspective and a lot to consider. Marcus Buckingham has been my guest. His book is called Nine Lies About Work, and you will find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Marcus.

All right, mate. Thank you so much. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks, and me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four

fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

You make a lot of financial decisions. Every day you probably spend time looking for low prices on food or gas or other consumer items. You have to decide how expensive a house or how expensive a car you want to buy, how much to spend on a vacation, how much money to save for the future. There are a lot of financial decisions to be made every day, which can lead to decision fatigue. Plus, with money, there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in those decisions, which makes things even more difficult. Well, here with some help is Amanda Klayman. She is a financial therapist and a financial wellness advocate for Prudential. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. You bet. So explain what you

mean by money decision fatigue. What is that? Because I don't hear that term too often. So what does that mean? Well, even though we don't talk about decision fatigue very often, I think it's something that most of us are pretty familiar with in terms of our experience. Basically, when we are trying to curb our impulses and really shape our choices in a healthy way, that takes a lot of mental energy. And this is not an inexhaustible supply that we have. So we actually have to be somewhat judicious and careful in what kinds of choices that we're making. Because some of us, whether we're trying to resist sugary treats or manage our emotions so that we're behaving appropriately, what we find is that when we get tired, when we get hungry, et cetera, that really depletes that reserve that we use to make the choices that are aligned with our values and intentions. So we see that a lot

when it comes to money. You know, most of us are really trying to make healthy choices in our lives. And sometimes we splurge, we do things that seem like, where did that behavior come from? And that can often be the result of decision fatigue. Well, everyone has had that experience. And I would call that willpower. I mean, I know I have more willpower to resist sweets or something in the morning than perhaps I do later in the day, because as the day went on, I've used up my willpower, and so I don't have so much of it towards the end of the day to resist things I probably should. Exactly. In the morning, you're rested, you haven't had to deal with all of the things that you've had to deal with over the course of the day. But it's when we find ourselves vulnerable that we find that that willpower is not there when we need it to be. And actually, there was a study about this a few years ago by a social psychologist named Roy Baumeister. And what he did was have subjects make a number of decisions.

So sometimes it was the resisting sugary treats, as I mentioned. Sometimes it was going through and evaluating a number of consumer products. And then he did a pretty classic test for willpower and self-discipline, which was having subjects hold their hand in ice water, which is pretty uncomfortable. And the people who had not had to do this task, which really sapped their willpower, were able to hold their hands in the water for 67 seconds. But the people who had had to go through that test, where they were feeling a little bit

more depleted, if you will, were only able to keep their hands in the ice water for 28 seconds. So that willpower, that whatever it is, is a depletable resource. So what do you do about it? Knowing that it will run out, then how do you work around it? I think that it really helps when people, first of all, understand that this is going on and are able to make choices that set themselves up for success when it comes to exercising their willpower. So in some senses, that can mean making good big decisions so that we don't have to worry so much about the small decisions. For example? For example, like if we're keeping it in the realm of money, look at your committed expenses. Look at those big things that you have to decide once or infrequently.

Things like how much you want to pay for housing, even down to smaller ones of that category like subscriptions, gym memberships, things like that. These recurring expenses that once we commit to them, these are going to be pretty stable moving forward. If we put in a good deal of energy to making sure that those committed expenses are really manageable, that leaves more space in our budgets when we're making cash flow decisions to not have to worry about whether we're adding a extra dollar or two for guacamole when we order a lunchtime burrito. We can also do things like automating our savings. So taking your amount that you want to save every month or out of every incoming paycheck and putting that aside, and then we just don't need to worry so much about spending whatever is left. You know what's so interesting is how we fret over financial choices and decisions

that are so small and we don't spend a whole lot of time on the big ones. You know, how many times have you stood in the supermarket and thought, maybe I should get the organic strawberries for another dollar than the regular one? It's a dollar. And yet we fret over that and use up some of that willpower. We do. And I talk about this a lot in my practice. I call this the matrix of competing needs. You know, we project so much of ourselves onto our decisions with money. So it's not even just about the dollar when we're thinking about organic foods versus

non-organic foods. It can be, am I the kind of person who values organic foods? Do the people in my social group really consider this an important thing? How does my feeling about the environment and factory farming factor into this choice. We are operating on so many different levels, even in those small decisions, that whatever we can do to clear the brush out of that path, if you will, is going to make those not feel so stressful. Because a lot of my clients really do experience those decisions as bigger than the dollar that one is really evaluating in that moment. So what's the prescription for the brush clearing? How do you do that? How do you not dwell on that? I think that the first thing that we do is identify

important choices from less important choices. And as long as our big, big important things are taken care of, you know, like making sure that we're familiar with our money, making sure that those things like negotiating our salary or our wage or rate, those things are going to make a big difference in our financial life, much more so than the accumulated small decisions. And if we feel comfortable, if we know that those things, that putting energy into those bigger things frees up space for us to not have to fret over those little things, then I think that it really allows us to have a little bit of humor, if you will, with ourselves, or at least say, you know, this is something that I want to have because I value it, and it's good for me. And that allows us to actually experience money,

not in a way where we're constantly trying to sort of lock down our behaviors, or even eliminate some of the things that are the most important joys and comforts of our lives. But to experience ourselves using money to give those things to us. You know, a lot of my clients, one of their biggest roadblocks to living a really financially healthy life is that because they have all of these, these draining experiences, when they are interacting with money, when they're thinking about it and using it, they really think of this process as sort of a process or a tool of no, as opposed to thinking about it as a tool of yes. What is it that we want to say yes to in our financial lives? And separating those things or differentiating those things from those choices

that are not as important. And we want to sort of, that's the brush that we want to clear out of the way. I think one of the concerns people have about those little decisions, and I've just gone through this myself recently, is that if you're not careful, all those little expenses do add up. My son likes to stop at Starbucks and get an egg sandwich on the way to school. And at the end of the month, and this was just a recent thing, and then at the end of the month, do you know how much I spent at Starbucks in the last month? Was it horrifying?

Yes, it was horrifying. Well, I'm not sure horrifying is quite the word. But it was a lot more than I thought it was going to be in the aggregate because it's all these little small expenses. And I think people think that way. Well, if I'm not careful about that dollar on the strawberries, then pretty soon it's another dollar, another dollar, and pretty take our eye off of these things completely. But what I love about the example that you gave with Starbucks is that you were looking over your accounts, you saw how much money it was, maybe that was shocking to you, if not horrifying, maybe it was shocking, because you had an idea that that you were spending less. But now you have the information of really what it means to get that egg sandwich if you sort of sit with that decision for a moment, you might come to the conclusion, you know, this is more than I thought it was going to be.

But it's still an acceptable amount once I sort of adjust to to the newness of that information. And so what I want to do is make sure that there's space in my overall cash flow to include this. And once you go through those steps, when you look at that number the next month, now that number is familiar. That number is a choice. You know that that number is safe because you've made other choices that support it. And so that can still be just fine. But we have to go through some steps to make sure that that is a choice that we want to make. In your line of work, when you talk to people who look at perhaps their financial past as well as their financial future, people who have lived several years and look back, and what do you find that people regret or wish they had done differently with their money that if they had to do it over again, they would do it differently?

I think that most people wish that they had enjoyed their money more. They wish that they hadn't fretted over it as much. I mean, all of us will go through challenges. All of us will experience pain related to money, but what we want to try to do is reduce our suffering around it. So when we think about all of the ways that something could go wrong, it may go wrong in one or two of those ways, but it doesn't mean that anything is added to that situation by the wear and tear that we experience emotionally around it. And but when people don't have as much money as they thought they were going to have, why didn't they have it? What went wrong? What are people not seeing in the big picture here that maybe they could do earlier on that would make things better later in life? I think that there are two problems. Number one is money makes us anxious, especially some of those bigger unknowns when we're thinking about retirement, for example. So we keep thinking that we'll get to it tomorrow. So there's time lost because we're

avoiding it because it's an unpleasant thing to have to consider. And it also feels like a really insurmountable thing to prepare for. So we start too late, first and foremost. And we have a hard time balancing the needs of today and where we need to use money to take care of ourselves in the here and now and what we're going to need in the future, which can again feel so amorphous. You know, any time that there is complexity and unknown, it makes it that much harder to change our behavior. And really saving for retirement, saving for those big things, that is going to take a consistent behavior applied over time.

So these are things that we as human beings are not naturally good at. And we really need to challenge ourselves, I think, to step up to taking care of that future self. Are there some things that you recommend that on a very granular level that people do as a matter of course to be financially responsible and make good decisions? intuition and how we feel in the moment to make decisions. Those are the instances where we are going to see factors like decision fatigue really impact in a negative way our ability to use money strategically and in alignment with our larger values and goals. So when we spend time with money, we have the opportunity to let in that environmental feedback, like looking at the bill for Starbucks, and then to shift our behavior if we need to, to do the things that are then going to bring those things back into alignment with our larger goals. You were able to look at that bill. You said, I don't like where this is going.

I'm going to make a different choice moving forward. It would be really tough for you to do that if you didn't have that step of seeking out and taking in the information about what that costs. I think that this is also the time where we can think about how we feel in the moment. And this is precisely the reason why people avoid doing this, because the way that we feel in the moment can often be pretty anxious and unpleasant. We don't like having to think, oh, I spent that money and I wish I didn't, or I really wish that I could just have that sandwich. It's frustrating to me. It makes me sad that I can't have it. And it's only when we allow ourselves to put together the information with the feeling that we are able to, that's the balancing out process. And it's tough.

One of the things that I discovered in working with Prudential is that roughly a third of the people who participated in this great financial wellness census really didn't have an idea of where their money was at. They either thought that they were doing better than they were, or they thought that they were doing worse. And I would say that that is 100% of the time due to an inability to really, or lacking the structure to really sit down and look at our money and make sure that it's in alignment with what our values and goals are. And so how do you do that? When you sit down and say, I'm going to sit down and see if my money is in alignment with my values and goals,

what does that mean? To do what? This is where I like to joke that your best money management app is your calendar. It means quite literally and simply that we need to have a practice, like something that is a regular, a regular part of our regular routine, where we're going to sit down and pay attention to money. So whether that's on a weekly basis, or a monthly basis, where we're doing three steps, we're going to review, we're going to review, we're going to predict, and we're going to plan. So review is looking at what's come in, and what's gone out in the period before. Predict is to look for those things that are

new and novel in the period ahead, and to make a plan for how we're going to adjust in order to keep our money on track with our larger long-term goals and those events that are coming up in that time period. So it's really, it's that simple, review, predict, and plan. This is where we help to be efficient with our energy and attention and to take care of those sort of larger trends. I love the example that you gave of the Starbucks. I keep coming back to it because those are the things which over time can really get in the way and it seems like such a simple thing, but we have to be paying attention in order to catch it. I don't know too many people. Well, maybe I know a couple of people,

but yeah, I know a couple of people who really laid out a financial roadmap early in life and did pretty well with it. But most people, I bet, when you talk to them, have some regrets about money, some fears about money, wish they'd done some things differently or wish they hadn't done this or maybe wish they'd done that. And what do you say to them? I don't know if you've ever read Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, but he talks a lot about how even when we don't have the power to control our circumstances,

we always have the power to control how we respond to our circumstances. So we may be dealing with the very real consequences of not preparing for the future in the way that we wish that we would have. But I would say that being able to be in a place where you can at least feel at peace with your choices and why you made them still adds greatly to the comfort that you would have and the peace that you would have in that phase of life, rather than constantly staying in just worry and regret about things and not being able to come to a place where you process that. Well, money is certainly one of those topics that

concerns everyone, and we all need to know how to handle our money better, and I appreciate the advice. Amanda Klayman has been my guest. She is a financial therapist and a financial wellness advocate for Prudential. There's a link to her website, amandaklayman.com. There's a link to it in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Amanda. Excellent. Thank you so much. This just happened to me the other day. I cracked an egg into a pan, and there was this little red spot in the white of the egg. It looks like blood.

And I thought, okay, so now what do I do? Do you have to toss the whole egg out, or can you just scoop the little red spot out, or should you just eat it and not worry about it? Well, it turns out that it actually is a spot of blood from the chicken who laid that egg, and it can happen when the chicken is under stress. Despite popular belief, it is not an indication that the egg was fertilized. That red spot poses no health risk. It's just pretty gross, not very appetizing. You can just scoop it out and continue on with your egg preparation. One of the reasons you seldom see these spots of blood is because there are inspectors called

candlers at poultry plants who shine bright lights at eggs to look for and then discard any egg that has those blood spots in it, because they know that those red blood spots freak people out. And that is something you should know. And that does it. That puts episode 278 of the podcast to bed today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love

our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show.

We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't.

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