Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Handle Your Emotions at Work | Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

These seven rules illustrate a middle path between completely stifling your emotions and bringing your whole self to the office.Liz Fosslien is an expert on emotions at work and is also on the leadership team at Atlassian's Team Anywhere and previously served as the head of content and communications at Humu. She has been featured by TED, The Economist, Good Morning America, The New York Times, and NPR.Mollie West Duffy is also the head of Learning and Development at Lattice, and was previously an Organizational Design Lead at global innovation firm IDEO, and a research associate for the Dean of Harvard Business School. She has worked with companies of all sizes on organizational development, leadership development, and workplace culture.Liz and Mollie are the co-authors of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not OkayIn this episode we talk about:Why not acknowledging your emotions can lead to worse outcomesHow to understand the data that comes from emotionsThe importance of psychological safetyAnd how to recognize burnout before it’s too lateFull Shownotes:https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/Liz-Fosslien-and-Mollie-West-DuffySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. You know, we get a lot of very mixed messages about how to handle emotions at work. Some people say emotions don't belong in the office at all. You should be stoic and sparkluck. Others say you should bring your whole self to work, whatever that means. My guests today, however, have found a middle path. They point out, and I agree with this, it seems inarguable, that it would be unwise and probably impossible to stifle your emotions at work, but that you also don't want to be a dysregulated, sloppy, compulsive, overshare. Liz Fossiline and

Molly West Duffy have come up with seven rules of emotion at work. Liz and Molly are the co-authors of two books, No Hard Feelings, the secret power of embracing emotions at work and then they followed that up with a book called Big Feelings. Liz is an expert on emotions at work and is also on the leadership team at Lassian's team anywhere. And Molly is the head of learning and development

at lattice and previously worked at IDO and Harvard Business School. This is, I should say, episode three of a four-part series. We're doing called Sainly Ambitious. We're investigating how work life balance actually works. Last week, we heard from Simone Stolzoff and Matthew Hepburn. And in our final episode on Wednesday, we're going to talk to Bruce Filer about redefining success.

And I should say, at the end of this interview, you're going to hear something new, my producer on this episode, the producer who's been working on this whole series, Justine Davy is gonna pop on, and we're gonna debrief after the episode. This is a new segment we're gonna experiment with in this season of experimentation

that we've entered on the show. And the idea is to give you a glimpse behind the scenes. Let us know what you think of this new segment. Hit me up on Twitter or go through the website 10% dot com. One final thing and this is unrelated. I do have a quick plug for a live event I'm doing coming up outside of Denver at the mile high church. It's on November 3rd. If you can't be there in person, you can watch the live stream. There's a link for tickets in the show notes. in the show notes. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and, on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever, you get your podcasts. Go Sound real.

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Wondirectioner to go it alone. Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band and explore why, when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcasts. Liz Fossiline and Molly West Duffy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Wow, that was a nice forest right there. Liz Fossiline and Molly West Duffy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us.

Wow, that was a nice forest right there. I want more of that throughout this episode. Liz, let me start with you. How did you two meet and come up with this idea? Yeah, so we met. I was living in San Francisco and I was moving to New York. This was over 10 years ago now. And I had, I grew up in the

Midwest and I had this idea that New Yorkers are, you know, gruff and abrasive and I would make no friends and I would just be completely bold over on the sidewalk. And so kind of in a panic, I emailed everyone I knew and I asked them to set me up on blind friend dates so that I could have a soft landing in the city and that someone would like take me under their wing and show me how everything worked and how to walk fast, that kind of thing. And I found when I moved to New York,

people were actually very nice. They were definitely more direct, but had a great time there. But Molly was actually one of the first friend dates. And at the time, we had both recently gone through experiences where we burnt out of jobs that were very unhealthy for us. And so we had really first-hand witnessed what happens when you care too much about your job, when you don't take the breaks you need, when you're not set up for success, and when you don't know

even how to address the emotions that are happening within you. And so we also bonded over, we're both poor sleepers. And so we have like sleep mask preferences, earplug preferences, white noise machine preferences, a lot happens when we travel. So there were just a lot of commonalities. And I think it was actually really talking through many of those shared experiences, being introverts as well, in a workplace

that really rewards and prizes extraversion that let us to think, what is the deeper thing that we're talking about here? And it really was feelings at work. And so the first book we wrote, no hard feelings, was very much the book that we wish we had had as we were going through these really challenging experiences of, again, getting those jobs that at first we thought were the successful job, right? Like I think we were both really excited and proud of what we had achieved. And then a year or two later, burning out completely and being confused by what had happened and really unsure of what to do going forward. What's your side of the story, Molly? Well, I think she nailed it. I think the collaboration side is that I was writing some articles about work culture

and startup work culture and Liz was doing some illustrations. We got to know each other's friends and I said, would you illustrate one of my articles? And she said, sure, and I just loved working with her. Liz has an amazing ability to take things that are hard to verbalize and visualize them in a very compelling way. And it just worked. Our collaboration just worked. Oftentimes when I talk to people they're like, wow, you're so lucky that like the things that she's good at, you're not as good at advice versus and we balance each other out. And then we wrote an article about interversion and it went viral. The title was six illustrations that show

what it's like to be an introvert and everyone was like, I showed this to my extroverted partner and it really helped them understand me and from there a book agent reached out and was interested and then we sort of figured out we were like, we're not going to write a better book than Quiet by Susan Kane about interversion. She nailed it, but we can write a book about emotions at work. And so we started digging into that. Awesome. Well, one of the things you talk about in the first book, No Hard Feelings, is these seven new rules of emotion at work. And if it's okay with you, I'd love to just kind of march through the seven rules.

Great. The first is little surprising, at least to me, which is be less passionate about your job. That runs counter to everything I was raised to believe. So let me just start with you, Molly. What do you mean be less passionate? Yeah. Well, when we created these rules for no hard feelings, we wanted them to be a little bit

of something that people would disagree with at face value to get people's attention, and that's what they have you doing, the publishing world, of course. So we as well, and like when we were in our 20s, it was like, you need to find work that you're passionate about and give your all to your job as you're figuring out what you want to do. And you know, we're not saying to take a job that you don't like or to just totally check out of your job, but it's to care more about yourself and your health

than you do about your job. Because if you are not caring about yourself and your health, you're not able to do your job. And Liz and I have both had firsthand experiences with burnout at work, where you are pushing yourself too hard, and then suddenly it's like, oh, I actually need to take a long leave from this job, or I need to completely step back in terms of my role

and responsibilities, and that's actually not helpful to either you or to your boss or to your job. So it's the less passionate about your job and care more about your own mental and physical health. Yeah, to add on to that. So I have a background in economics and math, so I think about it as like, what is your portfolio of meaning, right?

And if you're completely over invested in work, that's just not a good portfolio. You should always have balance. And so are you investing in the other things that bring you joy so that can be spending time alone doing something creative, spending time with your family, a loved one, a pet, whatever it might be. Because if you're only, if you're over-invested in work, that's when if something goes wrong, if your boss gives you critical feedback, those things start to feel so intense. Because suddenly, it's not just a piece of feedback. It seems like this is everything in my life, and therefore, if I'm not doing well at it,

that means that I'm not doing well, or there's something wrong with me. So I also think it's just not a healthy way to show up each day if you're so overly invested in what's happening in the workplace or in that specific job. There's a lot of external factors, right? Like the economy isn't great right now. People are getting laid off,

and that's not a reflection often of your ability. And so I think when that's only the only thing you have, that's when you start to see it as such. I remember I had a friend or still had this friend and she's really ambitious, she's very successful. And she during the pandemic, I remember she started to back away from her job a little bit, maybe a year into the pandemic, and not in a way where she didn't care anymore, like she still is very successfully leading a large team, but she was just making more time

for things outside of work. And I asked her about it, I said, I've noticed this distinct change in use since the pandemic hit. And she said, yeah, it really showed me for the first time in my life what it feels like when I only have work, when I'm not seeing friends, when I can't see my family, when I'm truly just at my computer from 6am to 7pm because there was nothing else to do. And so it was

like she just could do work during all those times. And she said it felt really meaningless, like even the joy that she had derived from her career when she couldn't share it with other people when it wasn't balanced out by other parts of her life. It just wasn't fun to her anymore. And so I thought that was also a really interesting reflection just hearing from someone, like, yeah, when you strip everything else away,

you realize that over indexing on your work, it's not as meaningful maybe as you might even have thought it would be. So there are a couple of arguments there that you've articulated one is that if you're too passionate, you can lead to burnout, it can lead to this lack of proportion where something goes wrong at work and that it feels like your whole life is wrong. It can remove from the large set of possibilities for meaning in your life.

It can remove a lot of things from the list if you're just focused on work, because friendship and family and volunteering and other things go out the window or diminish. But I also could, you didn't say this, but I can also imagine that, and I've heard this argument articulated by people like Alex Su-Jun Kim Pang, who wrote a book called Rest. He's come on the show before, and his work has been influential for me. And his argument is that rest and work are two sides of the same coin. If you have a meaningful life outside of work, and you're engaged in exercise or meaningful

volunteer work or parenting or whatever it is, you've got this kind of active rest portfolio as well. It makes your work better. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we write in our second book, Big Feelings, actually in the chapter on burnout, is that your well-being and resting and recharging is the foundation for everything else that you do. So too often we see vacation or a lunch break even as something we need to earn. And that's backward thinking.

So it's something that is what's going to accelerate your success and help you in the long run have a sustainable career. So yeah, absolutely agree. I love the concept of a rest portfolio. I think also for each person, it takes work to figure out what that is for you. So talk a lot about this in big feelings, but what's rest for one person is very different than what's rest for another person. So in terms of like if you feel like you're burning out, if you're headed towards, oh, like this is not good, I'm going to need to take like time away for my job.

like this is not good, I'm gonna need to take like time away from my job. Some people may want to take, you know, a week or even two weeks of vacation to fully unplug. For some people it might be, I gotta take a couple of Fridays or Mondays off. For some people it's about rescheduling their actual week so that they have more days during their work week without meetings and they can do that heads down work.

You talk a lot about meditation. For some people it's building in time, for meditation throughout the day. And I think especially when we're in our 20s, we have no idea. Like we just get to this point where we're like, I'm so stressed and it takes a lot of intentional time to figure out, okay, I've tried all these things.

Which one is actually the best form of intentional rest for me? And so I'd encourage people to play around with that. There's so many different options because, you know, what works for your partner may not work for you. I'm just going to flag where this is coming from, which is Molly and I are both introverts and proudly so and we both are married to extremely extroverted people. And so Molly and I've spoken about this where they will often see us become visibly stressed and they'll be like, oh, we should, we should let loose. We should, let's convene

a bunch of people. Let's go out. Let's get a bunch of people to a restaurant. Let's fill the weekend with things. And it's actually, I'll speak for myself here. It's taken work for me to be able to say, no, what I need is to close the door and lie in bed and pull the covers over my head and read a book and literally speak to nobody all weekend. Like, maybe my spouse and now I have a one year old, so obviously things have changed there. But, you know, and I think for a long time,

I had a lot of guilt around that. I thought it was weird. I thought I was just, I didn't like anybody and people didn't like me. I would really beat myself up for something that is just part of who I am. And it's different than my husband. And so now, little this last weekend, he went camping with 20 people. And that was a beautiful opportunity for me to stay home and have a very quiet peaceful night. And we both like came out of that super recharge and then had a lovely Sunday together.

So yeah, to Molly's point, it's listening to what works for you. Sometimes we get questions, we give workshops often about the material in our books. And sometimes we get the question of, I've done everything on the checklist. I say affirmations, you know, I schedule an hour to go for a walk outside and I don't know that it's really working. And then we say, well, what's your list, right? Like it's not the list that someone gives you that's gonna make you feel better. You should definitely try those things, but in order to make your own list of things

that you know are going to re-energize you and make you show up for work each day excited versus just completely burnt out. That all makes good sense. Let's talk about the second of your seven rules for emotions at work. The second is inspire yourself. What do you mean by that? Yeah.

So motivation. When we think about motivation at work, there's again, a lot of different reasons why you might not be motivated. So maybe you stopped making progress because you're bored or maybe your bored because you stopped making progress because you're bored or maybe you're bored because you stop making progress. And so thinking about, okay, what do you have control over and what do you find meaningful? There's a lot of things that we don't have control over right now in the broader economy, in the world, and even within our work. And so thinking about, okay, where are the

moments where we can build in more autonomy to our jobs. And so what I was just talking about is even one where it's like, okay, I know I have to get done the same amount of work every week, but what I can do is reschedule my work so that I have all my meetings on three days, and I have headstown time on two of the days. And that's actually gonna give me more motivation because I'm gonna feel like I have more control over my schedule, and it's gonna work better for me as a person. And so for managers, if we're speaking in the workplace,

managers should really focus on defining outcomes rather than processes. So you're gonna help people be more motivated if they get to create their own processes, their own ways of doing things. The other area that comes up a lot when we think about autonomy is finding your work meaningful and trying to reconnect with that sense of meaning. There's a story we tell in no hard feelings of a conductor in the New York City subway

system for the MTA. And Swelman, she views herself as a caretaker for her passengers, and there was a power outage, and it stopped one of her trains underground. And she personally walked through each subway car, cracking jokes at the passengers, to make them feel better, asking me how they were doing, giving them all the updates that she could.

And, you know, when you think about being a subway car driver that may not be at the top of our list for meaning, and yet here's this person who has created a immense amount of meaning within that. And so finding the things that, you know, you find interesting, that you find fun and following that and trying to reconnect with me, what is the deeper purpose?

The caveat here is obviously, if you're in a really toxic work environment, you shouldn't be doing back flips to try and figure out how to make it meaningful and fun. You know, if you've been feeling like this for months or other people in your life are starting to flag that it's become an issue for you, it's time to find something else.

But the advice can still apply. And so what I truly believe is that meaning can be flexible and sometimes if you're going through something really challenging or you're just trying to find a new job, meaning can be this job pays for my health insurance and this job pays my bills. And that's sometimes honestly, it's on really hard days,

still the meaning that I reconnect with. It can be showing up for a coworker. And so also taking a step back from the really aspirational definition of meaning. Obviously, that's what you should strive for. And that's really when the magic happens at work. But it's totally fine if it's raining and you have a cold, and it's just not the day for you to say,

today, the meaning is, the glass of wine at the end of the day, the meditation at the end of the day, just getting through and getting my paycheck. I think that's totally fine sometimes. Obviously not over a sustained period. The other thing just to go back to Molly's earlier point about finding autonomy that has been really useful for me is I think when we are disengaged or burnt out, we get into this mindset of just

getting through the task list and we forget to stop and try to enjoy or be creative in our work. And so for example, I was recently just had so much to do and I just found myself like frantically looking at my to-do list and looking at the clock and trying to figure out how I was gonna fit it all in. And it really sucked the joy out of my entire day. And so instead, I took a step back, walked around the block really quickly, and came back and I was writing this proposal for something. And I just said, okay, free of time constraints

and everything, like what is the best thing I could put on this proposal? What would make me really proud to send this to someone versus just sending the thing to cross it off the list? And I gave myself then an hour and it was a much more exciting, fun process of switching the question from, how can I get this done quickly?

How can I not send something that looks hacked together versus how can I be excited about this? What would make me proud? What would make me excited to get feedback on it? Because this is a really cool learning opportunity for me. And so even those seemingly small mindset shifts can have a really big impact on how we treat the work, the work that we do. And then ultimately that becomes really motivating when it's like, oh, I think this is really

good. I'm curious to see what happens with it versus, okay, fine, it's off my plate. A different way of approaching it, but you still had the same number of things on your to-do list and the same finite amount of time. Correct. So yeah, the time-boxing piece is still crucial. I think the thought exercises free of constraints and free of, you know, maybe expectations, what would be a really fun creative way to do this. And then figuring out, okay, actually only have an hour. Are there pieces of that? Maybe I can come up with a really catchy title or maybe there's some creative piece I can propose

within this and then map, like put that into my future plan. I do think you can't, even if you have limited time, it's very different to work on something with this mentality. Like I just need to get this done versus I want to do a good job. I want to impress someone and I only have 20 minutes to do it. Let's see what I can come up with. I think about that quite a bit. I have a colleague, Liz Levin showed up to Liz.

Oh, often we'll say to me, and it sounded like a throwaway line, but you would say to me, you have fun. And after a while, it kind of became a good version of an earworm. Like I realized that I was marching in a often militaristic miserable way through my to-do list. Like, there's no debating the fact that we get a little bit of time to be alive. So how do you want to spend it? Do you want to spend it heads down and with Gritted T third, you want to be enjoying what you're doing? And I think we can forget that like an unideal work environment were surrounded by fun interesting people.

And sometimes the demands of the week take over and it's just like we're all just marching through our to-do list. But that human connection, like that colleague just saying that to you or, you know, in his heart, it's really hard in a remote environment too, because we just have less of the like going out for coffee and lunch. I love that little reminder, Liz, that you said, and that your colleague gave, because I think that can make or break a day like you can be having a pretty tough day and then you can turn it around by saying how can I actively shift my work towards something that is a little bit more fun right now. your shit done and it doesn't mean that you have more time magically. There are aspects of work that just kind of are going to suck.

But can you put a top spin on it of, yeah, life is what I often quote that song from the specials, the Skaband from the 80s, and they say something in the lyrics, they say, enjoy yourself. It's later than you think. And can you keep that in your mind, even if objectively, the things on your to-do list are not that fun? One of my colleagues with her team has like an hour to a week where they get together on Zoom and go through whatever the thing is that they are most dreading or avoiding doing. Like their expense reports are that sort of thing. And they chat

while they're doing it or sometimes they play music or share stories and it's just like, yeah, let's collectively do whatever it is that we need to be doing. And I had another friend here where I live in Los Angeles who sometimes host parties where she has people over to her house and people bring the things that they've been avoiding doing, like their quarterly taxes or whatever. And so just doing things collectively, even that can make it more fun. That's fucking brilliant. Because we were talking recently on my podcast team, we're fully distributed to everybody's

remote, and we were talking about ways to bond. And there was talk of cocktails on Zoom. And I was like, no, I don't wanna do that. Adding another zoom to my day. It's also so straight out. She's gonna be like drinking alone in your apartment. Exactly. It's fun when you're looking at the computer

and then you look around, it's like, my apartment is dark, I'm just here with a bottle of wine. Exactly. But the idea of getting together and doing the shit work with some music playing or bonding over it or Unlimited swearing or whatever it is that actually is kind of cool Coming up, Liz and Molly talk about their third rule of emotions at work that emotion is part of the equation Why not acknowledging what you're feeling can lead to worse outcomes and how to understand the data that comes from our emotions,

emotions such as envy and anger, both of which I'm intimately familiar with. Bosch legacy returns, now streaming. Matt has been taken. Oh God. His daughter. He's in the hands of a madman. But the police have been looking for me.

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along with exclusive bonus content on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, or Wondery Plus kits on Apple Podcasts. The third rule on your list of seven is emotion is part of the equation. I'll pick on you Liz, what do you mean by that? Yes, so traditionally there's been this idea, and when I say traditionally for centuries, this idea that you have a spectrum and on one end is rationality, good decision-making,

and on the other end are emotions and hysteria. And that's a false dichotomy. You're going to experience emotions no matter where you are, what you're doing, if you're making an investment choice, if you're having a conversation, if you're making a decision at work. And so when you don't acknowledge what you're feeling, that's actually when you make worse decisions, when you have worse interactions. And so what I mean by that, and what we mean by emotion as part of the equation, is it actually needs to be something that's on any useful decision-making checklist.

So a clear example is, if I am really stressed, I didn't sleep well, and now I have to make a decision of where they're not to apply for a job. Research shows that especially people who identify as or have been socialized as women, when they're under a lot of stress, they tend to be more risk-averse.

And so if I don't factor in like, okay, I haven't slept well, I have a lot going on, I'm very stressed out right now. And that's what's making me afraid to apply for this job. I might actually see that as like, oh, I'm afraid to apply for this job and attribute it to, I'm not qualified. I'm not gonna get it.

There's like such a little likelihood that I'm going to get even a call back. And I might refrain from applying versus, if I were just here saying, okay, checklist. One piece of that is what am I experiencing? I'm scared to apply. Where am I that refrain from applying versus if I were just here saying, okay, checklist. One piece of that is what am I experiencing? I'm scared to apply. Where might that be coming from? It's probably coming from the fact that I haven't slept, that I'm very stressed. And so I'm actually going to override that consciously and still apply for the job.

Another example is if you come into work in the morning, if you're not actually processing, how am I feeling right now? How might that show up in my interactions? You might have things like, again, bad traffic that causes you to be frustrated that could stick its tentacle into a team meeting. One of the people that we interviewed for no hard feelings is Kim Scott, who wrote radical candor.

She's become a friend of ours and she said that she always thought of herself as this cool, calm and collected leader until one day one of her reports came up to her and said, I just want to let you know that the team knows what kind of day we're going to have by your mood when you walk in the door. And so what was happening is that she was not making that part of her routine about decision-making, but also more generally, I've just seen like one of my experiencing.

Maybe I just need a moment to kind of regulate the frustration because of traffic or the kids were screaming this morning so that it's not showing up in negative ways for the team around me. So that chapter is really about this idea of if you're not acknowledging the feeling, the feeling can take over, and that's going to lead to a lot of worse outcomes. And if you would actually just stop to think about what's going on within you. So back to Kim Scott, she's been on the show too, and she's incredible. What's the argument there that you should squash your emotions or that you

should just be open with the people around you about, hey, this is what's happening. Don't read into it that I'm gonna fire you well. Yes, so it's the latter and you can go into as much or as little detail as you'd like. So you can say something like, you know, if you know the person really well and they're up here, you can say, oh, I was stuck in traffic. The kids were screaming all morning. If I seem a little frazzled, it has nothing to do with you.

But if it's someone that reports into you, you might give a shorter version of that. So just like, it's been a morning, I need five minutes to have my coffee. I'll get back to you. I just want to make sure I'm present in this meeting. So again, you're flagging to that person. This is nothing to do with you.

I don't want to create unintentional anxiety because you've done that extra work of checking in with your emotions and then communicating and making sure that they're not spilling into a meeting and interaction in ways that will cause instability basically within your team or within your organization. And this does connect at number 7 on your list of 7, which is when and how to be open or vulnerable and we'll get to that in a little bit. But staying with this third of your 7 rules, which is again, as a reminder, emotion is part of the equation. This seems

to go to what I understand to be your core thesis, which is emotion is non-negotiably part of of work. And we try to pretend it's not, but we have to acknowledge that we're emotional animals and to pretend otherwise is a fool's errand. Yes, I mean, we are humans, whether we are at work or not. And there's something about the work environment that makes us feel like emotions are not professional. Like we should not have emotions between the hours of nine to five, but we still are having them.

Like that's not a choice that we get to make. And so the thesis behind all of the work that we do is, so what do we do with those emotions? When are they helpful? When are they not helpful? And as Liz mentioned, we never make decisions in an emotional vacuum, but we do need to think about when are the emotions helpful for making the decision and when are they not? And same thing with communicating them. It's not helpful to go around being a feelings fire hose, naming every single emotion that comes into your head. It's not helpful to yell and scream at other people.

But on the other hand, totally suppressing all of those emotions were missing out on really important data, especially around decision making. So we write about this in both books, like the emotion of envy of comparison has so much data in it. And I know you're a friend of Gretchen Rubin, and she's been on your show before,

and when she was considering switching from her law career into being an author, she noticed that she was reading in her alumni and her law school alumni magazine about all the people who had great law careers. And she was like, I have like a mild interest in that. And then she was reading about people who had a writing career. And she was like, I became sick with envy. And so that has actually a lot of data. It tells us what we value if we're honest with ourselves. And oftentimes

we're ashamed of having that emotion because in our society it's like, oh, you shouldn't be envious. That's a bad emotion. But it takes courage to say, like, no, actually I'm envious of this person. And so maybe I should explore what that career path is, or even within your same job, like, oh, I'm envious of that person getting a promotion. Well, maybe you want that promotion. And what can you do to move towards that? So in our second book, Big Feelings, we talk through a lot of these quote-unquote difficult or bad emotions that actually have so much to tell us. Anger is another one. So anger is loaded with information about something that you care about has been violated. So if I'm angry about something, that's telling me that I care deeply about that thing. And that anger can come out in not professional or not productive ways, but if we're able

to take a step back and understand what is the need behind that emotion, we can then say, okay, maybe it would be helpful to come back and share with this person when I'm calmed down a little bit about what was going on and why I felt so violated in that moment. That's also why we really try not to label and encourage others not to label emotions as bad or negative. And so most people will refer to things like anger and the exactly what Molly was talking about as these bad emotions. And then that carries with it a lot of judgment, a lot of shame. And that's when we stop learning from them when we just immediately try to suppress. So we admit that they are challenging, they can feel uncomfortable.

But again, I think it's so important, especially latering up to this idea of emotion as part of the equation, just to let yourself experience that emotion and not immediately label it as something that might make you shy away from it or not explore it to the extent that you should. You do talk about differentiating between relevant and irrelevant emotions. What's that all about? Yes, so relevant is an emotion that is actually very useful and pertinent to the decision or the moment at hand. An irrelevant emotion is one where it is better as much as you can to regulate it or to put it to the side and it might not be telling you something that's directly related to what you're experiencing in that moment. So example of I'll start with a relevant emotion. If I'm thinking about two job offers and one of them fills me with dread,

when I imagine myself doing it, and the other fills me with excitement and a sense of lightness, that's a really important emotion to listen to, because there's something in my subconscious that's coming together, even my consciousness, and saying, this job, probably not for you, this other job seems great.

And so that is a relevant emotion, because it's directly the emotion is coming from the decision that I'm making versus again, if I haven't slept well and I'm just really grumpy and I think about getting any job and I'm like, oh, I don't want to get a job. That might not be so relevant to the decision at hand. It's really coming from, oh, you just didn't sleep well. And so it's more useful to say like, okay, maybe I should come back to this decision when I slept well.

Maybe I can have a cup of coffee and revisit it. Or in some cases, it's really like, okay, how can I set this to the side and really just make sure that I'm regulating it as much as possible so that it's not going to affect my decision making. And I turned both jobs down just because I was grumpy in that moment. How should managers think about emotions when it comes to hiring and firing? Yes. So when we're thinking about the decision to hire or fire someone, there's sort of a caveat around that to our advice around emotions. So you should not rely strictly on your gut or your gut emotions when hiring. And a lot of times emotion is very much interwoven into the interview process and that we do base

our decisions on our gut feelings. And there's a lot of research around this that we're very quick to judge. So sometimes we make a decision within the first 10 seconds of an interview and then the rest of the interview is simply about trying to confirm what that decision is. And the reality is that the sort of emotional connection that we might feel when talking to someone that they make us feel good or we make them feel good, that actually has nothing to do whether that person is the best person for the job. So we make a lot of decisions based on like, oh, you're similar, you're familiar to me. And then we hire them, even though that has nothing to do with that.

For that, we can't, again, turn our emotions entirely off, as we've said. But we can think about ways to curb the bias. So there's a lot of ways to do this within a hiring process, clearly outlining what skills you're looking for, designing objective tasks for a candidate to do, and then blind evaluations where you're looking at resumes without looking at race, gender background, et cetera. And really thinking about doing it in the most structured process, so conducting a structured interview, scoring the interview right after so you can go into comparing them and just trying to overall reduce biases. And just to emphasize what Molly is saying, it's so easy to get pulled into that

similarity bias of, oh, this person is like me, we'd have so much fun together. You know, we were talking about fun earlier and trying to prioritize that. And I had a friend who was hiring for a role. And I had worked with her before she interviewed candidates to like clearly write out the specific skills and tasks that she needed this person to be able to do. And then she had narrowed it down to two candidates. And she said, oh, this one candidate, like we'd have so much fun together. I just really love talking with her. I really want to hire her. And I said, who has the skills that you need?

And it was not this fun candidate. And then I was like, look, you're not actually prioritizing fun, because guess what? It's not going to be fun when this person doesn't deliver, doesn't help you make the progress you want to make. And then maybe you need to have a performance conversation or maybe you actually now have a friend that you need to fire.

Like, it's easy to think it's going to be really fun, but if they don't have the skills, if they're not the best person qualified for the job in the long run, it's going to be the opposite of fun. So just to emphasize like how easy it is, you're like, oh, I just have this feeling. It feels so good. This would be so great. It's not going to be great if they don't have what you need them to do. But I find myself, and this is maybe me being obtuse, but I find myself a little confused

because when it comes to the hiring and firing, you're saying, well, we should kind of counter program against our emotions here, our biases and be a little bit more spock-like. On the other hand, I feel like maybe five minutes earlier you were saying, we can't rule emotions out. We need to sort of listen to our guts, our hearts, our seaweds and our bones, our intuition. So maybe does this all come down to relevant and irrelevant? So I think it comes down to understanding that, yes, we cannot

rule out emotions and knowing that no matter what our emotions are going to come into whatever decision we're making, and yet knowing that the context, whether you're firing or hiring someone having the structure to try to reduce the biases is going to be very helpful. And in any decision that you're making, you want to reduce the biases. It's just that hiring and firing happen to be hot spots for biases and so we have to be extra careful. Whereas if you're making a decision about like,

do we want to move forward with this internal program or not? There's just going to be less clear, clear ways to work against the biases. I mean, we could, we could go into the, you know, sort of decision making steps and making sure that you have all the people in all the right spots for decision making. But I think that it's about recognizing that there's going to be emotions no matter what and trying to do what you can to not remove the emotions, but to remove the biased effects of the emotions that you're having for hiring and firing. But it is still the case, though, in some, when Liz was saying earlier that if you imagine

taking this job and you're filled with happiness, you know, you should listen to that. So there are times when we do want to listen so that we can utter a full body yes to use the popular phrase. And there are other times when we want to listen so that we can say, oh, no, this is a bias. I want to set this aside. Yeah. In the earlier example, it's a great clarification, which is, it's not, oh, this job makes me feel good. And therefore, it's an, oh, this job makes me feel good, and therefore it's an immediate yes, and immediately turned on the other job. It's part of a whole package of things to consider.

So it's also like, what are the salaries? What are by needs? How far is the commute? If one job fills you with lightness and you would have to commute three hours a day, I would probably say, hmm, that's important, right? Like, you maybe have it factored that in initially as you were assessing it. And to Molly's point, hmm, that's important, right? Like you maybe haven't factored that in initially as you were assessing it.

And to Molly's point, yeah, it's totally true that you cannot remove emotion from something like hiring. It's just where the research shows, leaning too much into that emotion, really gets you into trouble. And it does seem to be like a uniquely biased area, especially in the workplace. And so I would argue that the structure that we encourage people to create,

so Molly mentioned, having standard interview questions, doing blind work samples where you sort of remove names and, you know, colleges, backgrounds, experience, and just really look at like which writing sample is the best, or which, you know, technical interview went the best. That's actually factoring in emotion and factoring in this, like, yeah, if we don't have these rigorous processes, that's when we're gonna let biastic as technicals into the decision, that can absolutely be true

for other decisions, that just they don't seem to be in the research, like as, I would say, potentially have as big of an impact on creating workplaces that are structurally unequal or where certain people rise to the top and others don't. So I think promotions is actually, I would add a third piece where it's really important to have the same kind of rigor. Coming up Liz and Molly talk about the importance of psychological safety, they will define that term.

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The fourth rule on your list of seven is psychological safety first. I'm a huge fan of this concept, but maybe you could start by defining what psychological safety is and then talk about why it's so important to be on that it's on your list. Sure. So psychological safety is when everyone in the group feels like they can suggest ideas, admit mistakes, and take risks without being embarrassed or punished by the group. And you can have a team of six people, and if five people feel like that,

and one person does not feel like that, it's not psychologically safe. So this is measured by every person has to feel that way. And this all came out of Google did a great study 10 or 15 years ago that looked at what makes really effective teams. And there were five things. And the number one thing that made an effective team was having the sense of psychological safety.

And this is all based on research, a lot of it by Amy Edmisson at Harvard Business School has done a lot of great work around this. And so we see this come up a lot around emotions at work because whether we feel like we can have certain emotions at work depends on our psychological safety, whether we feel like we can have certain emotions at work, depends on our psychological safety, whether we feel like we can communicate those emotions at work, depends on our psychological safety, and that we want to create space for that. So it's really awkward to bring up difficult things at work if you don't have time on the calendar

for them. So one of the things that I recommend that managers do and teams do is dedicate time to check in about the hard things. Like what's not going well, what's one thing that you feel like you haven't been able to share yet that you would like to share with me or the group. Because as we've talked about, we're also busy, we're running through the to-do list of our week. Then it's like, oh, I know I should bring this up.

I feel like maybe I got cut off in the last meeting or I feel like we should be heading a different direction than the team is heading. But now it's not the best time because we're talking about this other thing or I was gonna do it in my one-on-one but then we ran out of time. And so putting time on the calendar

to have these open discussions. And as a manager asking, what would you like to share that you haven't had a chance to share yet? What's important to invite in opposing viewpoints or things that people haven't said before? The other thing that managers can do is to lead with their own vulnerability, so to share their own times when they have failed themselves or they've been embarrassed or they're learnings along the way, which then again helps create space for other people on the team to share that as well.

The only piece I'd add to that is don't underestimate the power of seemingly small gestures. So in our book we call these microactions, so most people have heard of microaggressions and a microaction is the positive version of it, and it's things like pronouncing someone's name correctly. You can't really have a human connection with someone if you're butchering their name every time, and often and we've actually heard stories from executives who said, I just didn't want to go through that uncomfortable moment of asking someone how to pronounce their name,

especially because we've been working together for two weeks. And so then what happened is they never addressed that person by their name. And so now you're actively excluding the person that you probably should work hard to include, or you know, like just, if you're not familiar with something, just ask them. It's not a big thing. Spelling names correctly. Molly is M-O-L-L-I-E. My name is Elizabeth with an S, not as the last name is a nightmare to spell.

And so it's not a huge deal when people misspell it, but especially in email exchanges. It's like, our names are spelled right there in the email. It would take one second of thoughtfulness to get it right. So that's an example. Another one is to Molly's point, when you have these structured conversations, really explicitly thinking people for participating. It's one thing if you just say like, yeah, we're going to talk now and then nobody speaks up versus another. If you're like, hey, I really want to hear your feedback and then someone gives you feedback and you say,

thank you so much for bringing that up. I hadn't thought about that. And I'm going to see what actions I can take. Another thing we often hear during workshops is people saying, I don't feel psychological safety when I join a conversation or I'm new to an organization and nobody gives me context on what's going on. So there's like, actually no way I can participate because I don't know what that acronym means or I don't know who that person is

or I don't know where that project was a month ago. And so making sure you're drawing someone in, right, if Molly and I are talking and you join the Zoom that I'm saying, like, oh, hey, this is what we were talking about. Here's the relevant information. Here's a quick page I'm gonna link you to so you can scan it if you need more information.

Things like that, that again, we think of, as oh, this is such a small gesture, but it profoundly changes how someone feels in a space and how they feel they can show up. Two part question, is psychological safety only relevant in work, is it also relevant in friend groups, volunteering, families? And the second is, is it always on the leaders or is everybody responsible for psychological

safety? Yes. Psychological safety is important in any group setting. We talk mostly about work, but it's definitely true within other group settings as well. And I would say that it is on everyone, but that managers have an outsize impact on psychological safety. And so if there is a team that doesn't have psychological safety, I would go to the manager first rather than going to the individuals.

If you're on a team and your manager is not creating the space for that, it is likely that that person is not doing it intentionally. It's just that they haven't been taught the skills for how to create psychological safety, or they're just so busy that they're not able to create the space for that open discussion. And so, you can lead from below or from the side and say, Hey, I think it would be great for us to have some time added to our team meeting to check in as humans and have more open discussions about what's going on,

or you can share moments of vulnerability and embarrassing stories and lead, and hopefully your manager will get what's going on. I think the other thing that comes up in any group that you're and whether it's work or outside of that is conflict. So like, there's this idea that the best teams don't have any conflict. And that's actually not true.

The best teams do have conflict, but they have worked out systems for navigating that conflict. We see this come up in families all the time, right? Like, you can't be in a family without conflict. But if you have figured out systems for dealing with that conflict, and in the book, we talk about two different types. There's task conflict, which is the clash of ideas, or the way of doing things.

And then there's relationship conflict, which is about personality-driven things or arguments that are coming up. And it's much easier to deal with task conflict. So as an example, Liz and I had a lot of task conflict come up when we were writing a book, because there's lots of different ways that we each do things like write chapters and get feedback and edit and all of that stuff.

And so we had to figure out how to schedule in times to talk about that task conflict. Otherwise, our friendship would have been ruined. So we would maybe like monthly in the beginning, schedule time to talk about things before they became an issue. So like a small example is, I'm really a stickler about how I use Google Drive. Like I want everything to be in the right folder. I want emails to be separated out into threads. And so I said, Liz, this isn't an issue yet,

but if you keep doing this, I'm gonna be getting really frustrated about this. I'm very loosely creative. This is an artist. And Liz, to her kind of was like, oh sure, no problem. That's not a big deal. Of course I can do that. I had no idea that you wanted me to do that.

And so, you know, and I can see that come up in friendships and families too, where it's like, try to bring it up before it's a problem, because if you let it simmer, you will build resentment. And then it turns into relationship conflict. And then it's more about like, you're a person who always does this. Like you don't care about our relationship because you're not sending emails in the way that I want you to send emails. And so it's easier to deal with the task conflict before it turns into the relationship conflict. It's so funny too that brings up because Molly you mentioned that we have very complimentary

skills or ways of writing. And yeah, that's what we say now. There's also research that shows diversity on a team is hugely beneficial. If and only if people are experiencing psychological safety. So if you feel like you can bring everything that makes you different to the table. And so even though now Molly and I see ourselves as complimentary in the beginning, that caused us to butt head sometimes. So Molly correct me if I'm wrong. But I perceive our strengths is like Molly is so good

at having a blank page and filling it with ideas and quotes and just like she's so generative. And I think of myself much more as a lawn mower. So I love when there's a lot of stuff I love to come in and snip here and take this out and move this around and figure out like the best title. I just love like the editing process because it feels like a much more creative thing to me,

which isn't even true. It's just like, that's my perception of the work. I think it's very creative to fill a blank page. And so in the beginning, Molly would send me these like 10,000 word. It's true, Bill Dawes. And I would be like, oh my god, she wants to send a store editor.

This is what is she even saying? And then I would sit on it for weeks, right? Trying to get the perfect syntax. And Molly would be like, where is it? We need to send it out. What are you doing? And so it took us these conversations that Molly was describing to be like, oh, this is perfect, right? Like Molly, you take the first pass. There's all this cool stuff. Liz, you'd probably need to

shorten the time that you're taking to edit and not be so perfectionist about it. But then we, like figured out this handoff process that when we went to write our second book, I think our second book, it took us like a quarter of the time. I mean, it was significantly shorter because we had had these conversations, figured out our strengths, felt like we finally value the other person's contribution. And then it was just like boom, boom, boom, the work is done. But I would not say, you know, at the outset that we would have described ourselves as like having complimentary skill sets. I think we would have been like, you know, Liz really takes a long time over there. She's slowing us down.

There's a great quote from your book that I think actually is apropos. Here's the quote, when you're having conflict within your team, validation preserves psychological safety, parentheses, you could reconceptualize all conflict as a struggle for validation. Disagreement causes hurt feelings only when mutual respect hasn't been established. One of the most disrespectful things you can do is make someone feel invisible and validation helps people feel visible. It's so important and Again, this just takes time within teams to build up that mutual respect. One of the things that I try to do with anyone who I'm working with now is say, I am going to try to bring things up before they become an issue because I've learned this with

Liz. I will say to new people I'm managing, you know, this is going to seem like a small thing, but I really want to build trust here and I want to bring these things up before they're an issue so that we have a chance to resolve them. And just naming that, I think, builds a lot of trust because the person is like, oh, okay, good. So if you have a problem, I'm going to know about it. Like, I think what was the worst thing is when you're like, I don't know if this person has a problem with me. Like I might be doing this thing that irritates them, but they're never going to say anything. And this goes back to Kim Scott too.

You know, and when we interviewed her, she was like, people think that bringing things up is going to be tough. And that's actually, you know, it is, like it's hard to be the person to initiate a difficult conversation. But the majority of the time when you bring something up like that, the other person says, thank you so much.

Like I really appreciate that you brought that up. It actually strengthens the relationship when you bring things up because they are just so grateful that for the chance to talk it through. And again, validating like Molly said, right, I'm bringing this up in the interest of our mutual success. Like, I really want this project to go well. I really value your opinion and I just want to work through this so that we can, you know, get this work done faster and that we get to the best final thing. I think that's also a really key component. Rule number five is your feelings aren't facts. Say more. Yes. So we touched on this a little bit under emotion as part of the equation. But what often happens, because we haven't been taught how to think about our feelings, let alone

understand them or work through them, is that we have a feeling or we have a reaction and we just lean into it. We assume that it is based on absolutely correct data. And in fact, sometimes it's not. So the example that I give, which I think in the book, it's described as a colleague. This is actually my now husband. So I can finally share that. Now that I've been telling the story for years and we're both fine with it. But basically, when I first met him, when I would ask him a question,

he would respond and he would speak incredibly slowly and over and unseate every word. And it drove me up the wall. Like I really, I just remember telling a friend, like I might have to break up with a guy. He just thinks I'm stupid, he's maybe sexist, he's so great, but this one thing, it drives me absolutely bananas.

And I got to the point where I would just like, ask him questions. So as I said, I studied economics and undergrad and he's an economics PhD. And so sometimes I would be like, what is supply and demand? And he would be like, well, supply isn't ever, you're so frustrated. And then finally, months later, I've been stewing in this. I asked him, I was like, hey, do you notice without malice, right? Just do you

notice that when I ask you a question, you speak incredibly slowly. And he said, I know I just really don't want to sound uninformed in front of you. And so it's just, I can't help it, I just really am carefully choosing my words. And so it was the exact opposite of what I had assumed, right? I had like had these facts that he speaks slowly when he answers my question. I layered on an assumption, which is he's doing it because he thinks that I can't comprehend what he's saying. And then I threw on some judgment, which is the sex is big, how dare he. And I think that was an obviously not every situation. It's going to be like wrapped up in a neat bow and end in marriage.

But I think it's a nice reminder of often we do have these really strong reactions that are based on a conclusion that we jumped to without even formulating the thought often. And so approaching conversations, especially on conflict with curiosity, making sure to check that assumption on which your feelings are founded. And often the answer there is just giving yourself time to process, to back away from that really initial strong reaction. giving yourself time to process, to back away from that really initial strong reaction. You can't always do that. I saw a friend once where someone said something that she was visibly upset about, and she couldn't just leave the dinner table, or be like, I'm going to walk around the block

for 10 minutes. And she just said, I'm having a strong reaction to your words, and I need a moment. And I thought that was such a lovely way of giving herself space to kind of take a moment, come up with a question to ask, and then she actually ended up resolving the conversation with a couple of questions, and they had a really nice sort of end to, yeah, she realized that he wasn't trying to make her upset.

And so I think it's really, we always say, we hate the advice, never go to bed angry. Go to bed angry, sometimes you're tired, we hate the advice, never go to bed angry. Go to bed angry. Sometimes you're tired. Sometimes that's why you're mad and you just need to like get a good night's sleep and wake up and things will seem a little better. But fundamentally, it's again, this idea of acknowledging the emotion, letting yourself feel it, but not immediately taking action, right? Like, what is the assumption underlying this? Is this relevant? Is it irrelevant? Is it useful? Do I need to move forward with it?

Or is it actually something where I should try to figure out, you know, maybe I can come back to it later, or there's like a physiological need that hasn't been addressed. I'm hungry, that kind of thing. Yeah, this is good advice. I'll be wary of assumptions. I sometimes say that paranoia loves a vacuum.

And so if there's not enough information there, you will project often the worst possible interpretation. It's just what being human is. Yes, exactly. Yeah, we're storytelling animals. Number six on your list is emotional culture. Emotional culture cascades from you. What does that mean? Molly, I'll go to you. Yeah, so when we think about emotions at work, they do tend to spread. Emotions can go viral. So if if I'm having a bad date, I go to work, I maybe spread that emotion to one of my colleagues, and that colleague can go home and spread that to their partner or to their family. So emotions can, and there's research around this.

Emotions can actually spread from people who don't even know each other or don't even work together. And so when you are in a leadership or management position, you have to be even more aware of this than if you're in an individual contributor role. Because people look to leaders longer and harder for what emotions they are sharing and not sharing. And is that unfair? Yes, but it's just the truth.

Like if you think about if you work in a big organization, everyone's like, what does the boss think about this? And like analyzing every one of their facial expressions, what did they say, what did they not say? Like we want that information. And so what this means is that as leaders, you have to think longer and harder about what emotions to share when.

It does not mean that you should not have emotions or express those emotions. Again, you are human just like everyone else. But the example that we shared earlier of Kim Scott coming to work and realizing like, oh, my team is looking at me and can read my emotions. Whether or not I think I'm expressing them, I'm probably expressing them in some way. And so Liz and I came up with this term called selective vulnerability.

We love vulnerability. We love Brunei Brown and all of her work. And yet as a leader, being 100% vulnerable in the sense of sharing every emotion that comes up is not the best because it can actually destroy trust. So there's kind of this line that leaders have to walk where on the one hand, you wanna express enough emotion, leaders don't express any emotion. People are gonna think that they are like a calculating robot.

Like is this person even human? I never know what they're thinking or feeling. And then on the other hand, if they're expressing like all of their internal anxieties, all of the time, it's also like, whoa, this is, that's a little bit too much. Like I don't know that I trust this person. And it's gonna look different for every leader in every situation.

So this is not like a cut and dry formula. It's just more of a mantra to have around selective vulnerability. So as an example, if you are a leader and you have to share news around a layoff or a manager and you have to share news with your team about a layoff and that company, you might say, I just wanna share with you that I am also feeling

a lot of sadness and a lot of anxiety around this and this is something that really has kept me up at night. So you wanna share that real authentic emotion. And then you want to couple that with the path forward. And that's the thing that you have to do as a leader or a manager. Here's what we're going to do in the next six months to try our best to make sure that this doesn't happen again or to make sure that this team is not affected. And again, that's because individual contributors are looking to you as a manager for leaders, so like, so what?

So like, what are we going to do about this? But you can't skip this area of motion stuff. And I think that leadership, when we look at traditional models that was very much sort of male lead, I would say, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, even 2000s, the model for leadership was very much the stoic leader. Like we think about a CEO who does not share their emotions, you know, who just gets up and talks and sort of shares the financials and stuffs down.

And that's not what we're looking for anymore. So somewhere between, I would say now and probably like early 2010s, that changed. And what we want now from a leader is somebody who is more emotionally attuned and who's going to be more emotionally open about this. We saw this with Hillary Clinton. She came up with in politics in an environment where she had to be like a man and she, she, you know, was not expected to express her emotions. Then she ran for president. Everyone was like, but what she liked, like, what are her emotions? She's, you know, she's not sharing

her emotions. And she couldn't make that shift as much. That's just, you know, one example. So it's difficult and it is the sort of this added layer that leaders have to think about. And one place that we recommend starting with as a leader is understanding what is your own emotional expression, default tendency. So do you tend to be more of an over a motor? Like naturally, you share more of your emotions, people can tell what you're thinking, you wear your emotions on your sleeve, or do you tend to be more of an under a motor?

People who are always telling you, it's hard to know what you're thinking. And that sort of tells you like which direction do you need to move on that spectrum as a leader? So I'm curious, Dan, if we can put you on the spot here, like where do you think you fall within that? Are you more of an over or an under-emoter? Oh, definitely under.

People can't tell when I'm thinking, I've been told many times that I'm scary. Yes, I'm also an under-emoter. And so when I show up as a manager in a team, I have to remind myself, verbalize what you're thinking, because people have no idea. They're like, is she upset? She's not saying anything.

Or she excites it. She's also not saying anything. And so I have to remind myself to verbalize that to my team a little bit. Liz, what about you? I think I'm what we call an even a motor. And yet to go back to Molly's comment that this is a spectrum. I shift a lot on it. So maybe I'm more of a chameleon a motor. But I definitely noticed when I'm new to an organization, when I don't know people that well, I lean more

under a motor. And so those are moments when I'm like, okay, I probably need to be more expressive than feels natural. But when I'm with people I've worked with for a long time, my family, my friends, I'm probably more of a little dramatic over a motor. And so it's useful to know that as well. So I've worked with for a long time. My family, my friends, I'm probably more of a little dramatic over a motor. And so it's useful to know that as well. So I've worked with a team for four years at a startup. And I would actually, what before I showed up to meetings, especially when I was in a really bad mood,

it was a startup, things went up and down. I would have to check myself basically and say, you don't want to show up and be this frustrated. And so it's time to lean a little more towards the middle so that you're creating stability. One quick thing just to go back to the comment around emotional culture, just to clarify for people because I think often people will confuse it with company culture, which is something that's often spoken about. And company culture is very much explicit

and it's usually written down somewhere and it's a rubric for how to make decisions, how to act things like move fast and break things or, you know, I'm in the Bay, so that one comes to mind in the startup world or something like put the customer first, right? That's how you can make a decision based on that. Emotional culture is usually not explicit. It's usually implicit and it's

formed by like these seemingly small gestures and behaviors and there can be many different emotional cultures within a single organization. So the classic example that academics give as a hospital where you have nurses who might behave one way around patients where they'll be very caring, they'll be very supportive, they'll answer questions, and then when they're in the break room with other nurses, they might just need to blow off steam because it's been a really long day. They might vent about something, they might joke, they might laugh, they'll just be in a really different, you know, emotional state than when they're with a new mom or

with like someone who's grieving a loved one completely different. And so within a more traditional knowledge worker organization, your team can have a very different emotional culture than another team. And so a practice that Molly and I have done with many teams at this point that I love. I think you could actually do this, you know, to your earlier point, like in any setting with your family, with your friends in a community service organization. It's actually making those norms explicit. So we call it an it's okay to list.

We didn't come up with the idea, it came from a designer at the UK Digital Services office. But it's basically getting everyone together and saying, let's co-create, let's make explicit, what we want everyone to know it is okay to do. Things like it's okay to have a bad day. When the news feels heavy, it's okay to say you just like, need to have your camera off.

It's okay to have a great day. It's okay to have a messy desk. It's okay to ask questions. It's okay to take a break. It's okay to run around the block over lunch. It's okay to take lunch. All of these things, again, that have a huge impact on our performance, how we feel, how long we want to stay

at a company, but that usually we never talk about, or maybe you hear during onboarding. And then a year later, you're like, I remember hearing that I can ask what an acronym means, but is that true? Like, no one's ever said that to me again. And so that's where it's really useful to have this codified list of, this is at least the emotional culture towards which we aspire. And we're going to hold each other accountable towards making that happen. Just to call out that we're toggling back and forth here between the six the rural emotional culture cascades from you and the seventh, which is be selectively vulnerable. Back to rule number six when you're talking about the emotional culture,

what's your view of whether it's okay to cry at work? Great question. We get this. Yeah, every single time we've ever let a session, the first Q&A is always about crying. So first of all, research shows and art and a total experience shows. Everyone has cried, maybe not at work but about work. So it's far more common than probably, you know, we like to admit. And the biggest

thing is first in the moment kind of create a space that feels good to you. So often that usually means like excusing yourself going to the bathroom. I think it's useful to kind of find, again, that it's the like pause and give yourself space to become less emotional. Like we always say, you should be able to talk about your emotions without getting emotional. That's usually a useful rubric for when you can have a conversation. But it's also just don't shy away from that. So it's a response to something. So figuring out like, why did I cry? And maybe you can take that to your manager. Like I just feel so overwhelmed. Can you help me reprioritize if you're the manager and someone cries, making sure to come back and say, you know, I noticed

you had a strong reaction yesterday. I really want to support you. Can you help me understand what's happening so that I can step in where I need to. And then the second piece is, again, going back to this, like, don't make assumptions about why someone is crying. So super interesting research, a researcher asked men or people who identify as men, why do you think people cry at the workplace? And they overwhelmingly said, because they're sad. And then they also said that they sometimes withhold feedback, especially to women, because they don't want to make them sad, they don't want them to cry.

And then when the research asks people to identify as women, overwhelmingly the answer was, oh, I'm not sad. I'm so pissed off. Like I'm extremely, I'm not sad, I'm enraged. And I'm frustrated. I just don't feel like I can make progress. And that's where the tears are coming from. Don't assume someone is sad when actually they're live it.

Like it's really about coming to it with curiosity. And Molly, I know you have a lot to add here too. It's a fascinating topic. Yeah, I mean, for women, especially we have in socialized where it's not appropriate to show anger by yelling and so anger comes out through tears. It is a biological reaction. Also, women biologically

have shallower tear decks than men and so a man and a woman can have the same level of emotion and a woman will cry sooner than a man because of biological structure. So we have a story of somebody who was a TV writer and they cared a lot about politics and they wrote for a late night show and the late night show made the decision during the 2016 election to stop talking about politics because it was just so divisive. And in one of the staff meetings and one of the writers rooms, this person started crying about that decision. They weren't sad about it. They just cared a lot about politics,

and they were frustrated that the head writer had made this decision that they weren't going to cover the election anymore. So that's how it can come up. And I think that, you know, it's just such a human reaction. And I think we were afraid of it in a way that we don't need to be afraid of it.

Fascinating. I had heard the data before about men thinking that women were sad, when in fact they're pissed. And I found that interesting. The first time I heard it, and it's great to be reminded of it. I never heard the thing about the shallower tear ducts. I'm going to tell my wife that immediately. Is there anything I should have asked in the course of this interview that I failed to ask?

One thing that I want to bring up in this topic of selective vulnerability and emotional culture is that this varies hugely by actual culture of origin in which you were raised. So there's a great book, when we reference called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, which I recommend anyone who works with cross-cultural teams, which is most of us at this point. And she looked at what are the most common ways that cross-cultural teams disagree? And there's like eight different scales, and one of them is on emotional expression. So there are countries like Greece and Italy and Israel that are much more emotionally expressive and then there are countries that are like Korea, Japan that are less emotionally expressive. Now this is obviously a huge generalization. Those are huge countries within those countries and cultures.

There's a huge range of how emotionally expressive people are, but it's just more about, you know, what can we learn from the generalities so that we can have that awareness and that education when we are working with colleagues. And this also shows up even within the US. There's, as Liz talked about in the very beginning, New York has a very different emotional expression culture than does, let's say, the Midwest in terms of how direct they are about things. I had a former colleague who was Israeli and we were working in a consulting environment when she started working with new teams, which is quite frequently. She would always say, my background is that I grew up in Israel and I am going to be much more emotionally expressive and more direct with my confrontation than you may be used to. I just want to name that. It's something that you will get used to and probably even appreciate about me, but I just want to name that. And that was so helpful to hear as somebody who grew up in the US of like, oh, okay, I get where that's coming from. But you can imagine if you had

someone who was from Israel working in Japan or vice versa, that there would be a huge disconnect between the level of emotional expression that's just sort of natural or the default in those cultures and that might be to conflict within a team or organization. Yeah, my parents are immigrants and my families all in northern Europe, so they're very stoic. And I just remembered to Molly's point, my mom is an interpreter translator and I was looking through the emails. She was sending her US-based clients and they were just like, here is the document you requested period, Sylvia. And I was born in the US, grew up here and I was like,

oh my gosh, you have to be like, how are you? How was your weekend? Here's the document requested. Let me know if you need anything else. Hope you're doing well. Thank you, Sylvia. And she just looked at me and she said, why?

I just did not comprehend. And then she started doing it and that she called me. I remember a couple of months later, she's like, I asked someone how their weekend was and they told me their daughter got married and they told them about you. And it was just, I've never had this kind of interaction or some very, very big cultural differences.

One thing that Molly and I talk about often that I just wanna flag and you asking, is there anything else? And we touched on burnout earlier. And it's really understanding also the early signs of burnout. So one of the things I think that the two of us really took away in researching our second book,

Big Feelings, was this conversation with a coach who coaches people going through burnout. And he said that we often talk about burnout as like the moment when you can't get out of bed, or it's just, I actually need to take time off of work. It's this huge crisis in my life. And in fact, first burnout taps you on the shoulder with a feather over and over and over again until finally it hits you with a bus. And your job is to listen to the feather taps. So those are things like, you know, people that normally are lovely suddenly seem very irritating. If your team overnight is super irritating, it's probably not them. You're probably going through something.

If you start to cut out things you know are good for you. So suddenly you're like, I just don't have time to exercise. I don't have time for therapy. Probably your way to overstretched. Another one is when the idea of getting a cold, of getting like a sickness, not really sick, but sick enough to take a day off, if that just sounds like a relief, like you feel so much like lightness at the thought of that, that's terrible, right? We shouldn't be looking forward to sick days. And then one that really resonates with people is this concept of revenge, bedtime procrastination. So it's late, you go to bed, you're exhausted from the day, you turn off the lights,

and instead of getting the sleep you need, you pull out your phone and you doom scroll. Or for me, it's my vice's TikTok, and I'm just on it, and my eyes are falling shut, and I jerk them open, and I'm like, no my vice's TikTok. And I'm just on it. And my eyes are falling shut. And I jerk them open. I'm like, no, watch the TikTok. And that's just a, it's a horrible cycle of self-sabotage because then you wake up the next day and you're exhausted. And usually people will say, it's my only me time. Like, it's the only time when I can actually lie down and decompress. And so I'm like trying to claw back some control. And these are all signals that we tend to ignore. And we're like, it's fine, it's sustainable.

I'm actually a superwoman because I can power through and I'm so busy and we're in a culture that rewards busyness as opposed to being like the fact that I'm actively forcing myself like to jerk awake to doom scroll through the news is a huge sign that there's something wrong in the way of structured my days. So I think my message to anyone listening here, and I think, you know, I definitely still need to hear this every day is those are really important signals that you shouldn't ignore, and it's not, you know, it's not super impressive to power through them. You're actually actively hurting your chances at a meaningful life, a sustained career, like anything that will make your life enjoyable down the road.

Super helpful. I love TikTok too. It's so addicting. They really, it was somebody called the digital fentanyl or something like that, which is like me. Oh my gosh. That sounds right. Maybe a little harsh, but yeah, not that far off. Liz and Molly, thank you very much for your time. Great to meet you both. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having us. I thought you were going to do that at the same time again. I'm just a point.

Just a point. As I mentioned at the top of the show, we're doing a new thing now where we're going to bring on the producer of whatever episode we've just finished recording and do a little debrief. And the producer, DuJour, is Justine Davy, who's been working really hard on this whole work series that we put together. So Justine, how'd that go for you?

I think that went really well. I think what's really interesting to me is whenever I produce episodes that resonate with actual feelings I have, either in my life or on this job You can't really get away from that when it's a episode about emotions at work Okay, so what And maybe maybe you probably aren't gonna be comfortable doing this but like what I'm comfortable with everything Yeah, she loves being on mic As my boss you can't tell me what I'm comfortable with everything. Yeah, she loves being on Mike. As my boss, you can't tell me what I'm uncomfortable with.

Okay, fine. So were there things that came up there where you were thinking, oh yeah, well, Dan needs to get a lot better at that? Well, I think the one that stood out the most that I, and I noticed these things when I'm writing out notes and I either underline it a bunch of times or if I'm typing then I do it in all caps. And then I put this one in all caps note. It was putting Dan on the spot, are you an over-emoter? And then I wrote exactly what you said and you said, under a motor, I've been told many times that I'm scary.

And it was one of those times where I was so glad that I was on mute because I just laughed out loud and like scared my dog. Yes, Marissa Schneiderman, who is, she's our senior editor. She's the one who told me I was scary once, which I actually really appreciated because if I'm scary, she's brave enough to tell me that I'm scary. I mean, I've been on the show now for over two years and I do remember those early times where it was like, oh, I'm not going to interview with Dan as part of this process. You're just going to hire me and he's just going to accept

me. And I just remember the rollercoaster of emotions it was until I knew you as a person and knew you as a boss. And I even think after one of our first team retreats, it was like I had to ask three times like, it's okay for me to directly text you and you're going to respond and read such text. It's a silliest thing to think about, but I think that's the kind of thoughts that you have in your head as an employee of Dan Harris. But I think it's probably more, I don't want to de-emphasize any of my personal failings because I'm a connoisseur of my own personal failings.

I also think that there's a universal thing going on here, which is that when you, this is not an original observation, I'm stealing this from somebody else, I don't know who, but when there's a power differential, when somebody's your boss, either the ultimate boss or just even just one wrong above you on the hierarchy, you tend to dehumanize them. And when I first heard this, I was like, oh yeah, I've been doing that to my boss since I was in my early 20s. I got my first job. If you're the boss, I don't confer upon you

the full range of human emotions. I don't think you have. And I probably wouldn't have been able to articulate this to myself. But you're so busy like reading their facial expressions for anything that says anything about you and where you are and what they think of you, but you're not really thinking, oh, well, maybe that person's mom is sick, or maybe that person, it hasn't saw me or, you know, maybe that

person got in a car crash or whatever it is, you don't really think about people in power the way you think about somebody who might be, you know, your peer. Is that makes sense? Yeah, I think so. And I think part of it is that I knew so much about you before you knew me. So having read your book and seen you on TV, I had this relationship with you in my head already.

And then it was like, is it okay if I bring up the thing that he wrote about that I had listened about, but he didn't know that I knew that I knew it. And it was kind of like these weird cycles and loops in your head of, well, what does he know about me? And then how do I get him to know me to make sure that we're on a good playing field? I know I think over time,

our relationship is really evolved and made us stronger, just team wide. Our team's been together for a long time now. Yeah, that's a funny thing because it's like, you do kind of know me if you read my book. And then I can imagine if you're working for with me, you might be thinking, can I make a joke about the fact that he used to do too much cocaine?

As I say that, I'm like too much cocaine. Is there any safe dosage for that? Probably not, anyway. But yeah, can you make jokes about things that are already public? Yeah, so I think that's an awkward situation. Inherently, I get it. I was going to say, I think one of the ways to get around that is to have secret slap channels that you're not invited to where we can make all the cocaine jokes. I only recently found out about this. I don't even know the name of the channel, but I know I'm not invited. It's for the best. I don't take it personally.

Good. What did you think about the crying at the channel, but I know I'm not invited. It's for the best. I don't take it personally. Good. What did you think about the crying at work thing? So I'm really glad you asked that question. And I think... Well, you only asked the question because you put it in my prep doc and told me to ask it just to be clear. I specifically wrote, I was just seeing the producer feel like when people talk about being emotional at work, they think about crying at work.

And I feel like there is such a stigma around that. And I'm so glad that they brought up those studies about anger versus sadness and even the tear duct thing. I think that was just such a good thing to know for people who are curious about this. And I think it speaks to just their general core thesis about vulnerability and how emotions are part of the equation.

And I think it goes back to talking about what we should do when we're remote and what we should do when we get together as a whole team. But one of the conversations we had as a team was about vulnerability. And we were talking about the Lindsey C. Gibson episode. It was like a nice casual dinner in the West Village. And a lot of us started talking about sad family stories.

And I remember at the end of that, I think I apologize to you. I was like, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to ruin dinner. Then you said something that really stuck with me and it was something about vulnerability is okay because it helps us do our jobs better. And I think, especially in our job work,

we're trying to help people live better. When you see how many cry work, do you feel judgmental or just make you feel safe? How does that, what's your gut reaction? I think I'm very different now in my reaction than how I probably would have been, you know, however many years ago. And I think now I'm in a place where similar to what Liz and Molly were saying in the interview is recognizing it as a signal. It's that idea that like everyone's going through their own shit.

You can't expect everyone to have the best day ever. And you have to understand that there are real humans behind these Zoom rooms and these microphones. And they're going through things and that impacts their ability to do their job. Or when we talk about psychological safety, which also harkens back to our Brunei Brown episode about the difference between stress and overwhelm

and the stoplight exercise where it's like, if someone's red, we need to stop what we're doing and we need to really, really address what's going on so we can make sure this person isn't a good place and we can move forward. I've been in a few situations at work like in combat zones where maybe once or twice I've cried, but I don't think I've ever cried like in the office.

It's certainly not in front of other people. I don't not saying that like that that's a good thing on my part, but I think it probably goes back to what we're talking about at the beginning of me being like emotionally guarded or hard to read. I think it has to do with like masculinity probably. Well also partly my age, I'm 52 and and it was not an okay thing to do when I entered the workplace. And also that while I had this memory, I probably talked about this before, I was 14 and had a sleep over with three other friends. So the four of us were together and we're in my buddies basement and I got hit in the

head with a lacrosse ball and I cried and everybody made fun of me all night and I think that moments like that just teach you not safe. Don't do it. I think the masculinity definitely has a thing to do with it. It reminds me of this book by Liz Plank called For the Love of Men and it just talks a lot about these ideas that you grow up with and how it impacts your relationships or your job, but it can really have a negative impact on just your overall health as a person. Because I think there are enough studies that show, you know, crying

is healthy or expression of just emotion at the base level is very healthy. So I think a lot of our guests, Allison Gopnett comes into mind, talks about what happens when we suppress these emotions and how they play out the rest of our lives. Yeah, what happens in my case is you become impossible to read. But you do accept text messages and you will respond. But I still remember my first text message to you. And I think it was thanking you, like thanking you for this retreat. I try to like be breezy about it. And we're just like just texting you for this retreat. And I tried to, like, be breezy about it. And I was just, like, just texting you.

Thanks for all the great advice. And looking forward to texting you again, bye. This is just seeing, it was something terrible. But it was a moment because it was just, like, no, I'm not going to text Dan Harris. I will text my manager who will then text him after she edits my message to make sure it's appropriate enough.

But now I think, maybe it takes two enough, but now I think maybe it takes two years, but now I think it's at a level where it's much more relaxed and you can get to just the hard question or just regular questions. And I think that was something that came up a lot in the interview as well where it's like, how many assumptions are you making up in your mind when the information that is missing that is causing you to feel a certain way can be answered by just asking the source. Have we asked Dan yet if he would really dislike XYZ or something like that? And so I think I've been better at that as well in terms of, let's just ask the question because it's clearly a worse to not.

Yeah, I think that you're onto something and this is why the psychological safety thing is so important. You've heard me harp on this behind the scenes about our team over and over and over again. And what I always say is it's on me, but it's not easy because it can take two years, given your background, given anybody's background, I can say as much as possible, text me. Ask me the question, I can reward you or I can reward people for being open and to demonstrate

time and again that if you're open and you're critical, it'll be good for you. And it's just a scary thing to do. And I still have my unexamined shit too. I mean, I'm trying to examine as much of my stuff as possible, but I am far from perfect. And so even with the intention to create psychological safety, if you combine the fact that I retain the capacity to be a schmuck in ways that I'm not even aware of, of course, with the fact that every human like you is complicated and is bringing a bunch to the table,

psychological safety can be hard to establish in my experience. Yeah, I don't think it's easy at all. And I definitely come from different lines of work where it just wasn't a thing. I mean, I don't really think I even understood the phrase until until this job, but I think knowing that we have it, you really do recognize it to where if I get a little emotional in a meeting or if I have something that I know I feel bad about saying or I'm just worried about saying it. I know that saying it is always better. And I feel like we've been really lucky in that kind of communication is received really well because it does help us do our jobs better.

Yeah, but if you were working with me 10 years ago, wouldn't have been received really well. You know, it's like I've had to learn that over and over. And I'm still not perfect at it. There's definitely versions of you in your book where I'm just like, I don't like that Dan, like that Dan's an asshole. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, agreed, correct diagnosis. But also speaking of psychological safety,

you have a military background. What's your rank? I am a major. So major, Davey, it has a military background. Still, what's the term you're not active? Are you? No, I'm in the reserves. Okay.

So, I mean, I don't know how psychologically safe that atmosphere is. I think it's probably getting better. I think, now that I'm not active duty, I'm not really in the mix. There are definitely things that weren't around when I was around, even just more open conversations about mental health. Like when I was a younger lieutenant, there was like a very just deal with attitude. And I do feel like that's softening in some areas. So I think it's a good thing to see.

All right, major David, this was an experiment, but you've done a great job with it. Thanks for, I know it's not easy, especially with a scary boss. So, you're not scary anymore. Two years in and you're the opposite of scary. I don't know what the other scary is anymore. I don't know what it is, but you are it Dan Harris. Thank you.

Thanks again to Liz and Molly. Thanks to you for listening. Really appreciate that. Just to wrap up here, I love this new thing that we're doing with the debrief with the producer. We're going to try this on lots of episodes. Thank you, Justin, for being a guinea pig. Thanks to Liz and Molly. For the interview, Liz Fossiline and Molly West Duffy, check out their work. Thanks to you for listening. Really, really appreciate that. 10% happier is produced by Justine Davy. You just heard from Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer.

We get our scoring and mixing from Peter Bonaventure over at Ultraviolet Audio, and our theme was written by Nick Thorburn of The Band Islands. We'll see you all on Wednesday for the final installment of our insanely ambitious series with Bruce Filer, who's going to talk about redefining success. Also, don't forget the live show if you live in Colorado or nearby in Denver and if you want to watch the live stream again the link is in the show notes. Hey hey prime members you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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