The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Fail at Work

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

You can't alway win at work. We all have career setbacks and disappointments - and learning how to deal with them is vital. We need to move on from our mistakes, accept that we're not superhuman, and be willing to see failure as the price of experimenting and taking risks. Former news anchor Dan Harris (of 10% Happier with Dan Harris and DanHarris.com) joins Dr Laurie Santos to discuss the things that have gone wrong in his work life (he had a panic attack live on national TV) - and the ways in which we can reframe how we greet our career failures. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. For our special show on World Mental Health Day, I assembled a group of well-being experts I like to call the Titans of Happiness. Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Harris, and Sesame Street's Elmo. Titans of Happiness?

Dr. Noy, what's a titan? Elmo's just a monster. It was a super fun crew to hang out with. But most importantly, we covered a lot of ground. We gave you some of the most effective and easiest happiness hacks around. But this year's World Mental Health Day was dedicated to happiness in the workplace, a topic that's way too big to fit into just one show. So I'm bringing you another two episodes on the subject of work and well-being.

And I asked one of my happiness titans, Dan Harris, to return to the show to help. And the topic of happiness at work is one that's pretty important for Dan. In fact, Dan's entire foray into the study of happiness began after a very unfortunate incident on the job. 2004, a little bit over 20 years ago, I was on Good Morning America filling in as what was called the newsreader. We don't really have this job anymore, but back then there would be somebody who would come on at the top of each hour. So the morning shows at that time went from seven to nine. And Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of Good Morning America, her job then was to come on and read a set of headlines at the top of the seven and the eight o'clock hour. And I was filling in for her on this June

morning. And I had done this many times before. I wasn't nervous going in, but a few seconds into my shtick, I was supposed to read six brief news items off of the teleprompter. And by the way, I was 32 or something like that at the time. I have for more than 10 years been on television reading off of a teleprompter. So I really, just to set the table here, I didn't have any idea about what was about to happen. I was not prepared. And a few seconds into my thing, I just kind of lost it. My my heart was racing. My palms were sweating. My mouth dried up. My lungs seized up. I lost the ability to speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're anchoring the news. and Diane, the main hosts of the show at the time were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson. And, you know, I kind of got away with it in that it was, if you look at it, actually,

if you Google panic attack on television, it's the number one result, which is, my mom is very proud of that. If you look at it, for many people, especially people who've never had a panic attack before, it doesn't look that bad. I kind of hold it together. I know when I look at it, and a lot of people, you know, my mom who was watching live knew exactly what was happening. But the people in the studio were concerned. But when I lied to them, and I'm not proud to admit this, but I did lie and say, yeah, you know, I don't know what happened. I'm fine. They kind of let it pass. But I actually knew exactly what had happened. I had I had had little moments of this on television before I had dealt with stage fright for a long time. I sometimes joke that my career has been a triumph of narcissism over fear. And I really wanted to be on TV and I love the job. But I did have this, you know, bedrock stage fright. I had I had, however, never had anything that strong and so that moment turned out to be a one of the seminal moments of my life in my career too and i bet at the moment you didn't

necessarily think that right i mean at the moment it must have felt like a profound failure like an enormous screw-up like on live television a million percent yes that's exactly what it felt like i felt totally humiliated and terrified that I was not going to be able to do this job anymore, that I was just going to, this was going to just keep on happening. There was no silver lining in the moment. But in the future, you were able to turn this into a huge benefit. You were able to learn from this. So tell me what could happen next. Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a long time. Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a long time.

Well, nothing much happened initially. Just, you know, I don't know, you know, many of your listeners may not have been of age in 2004. And for those of you who were, you may not remember this or maybe you do. But public discussions of mental health were quite limited at that time. So it wasn't like I could turn around a week later and say I had a panic attack and I'm going to turn this into some sort of public health message that people might rally around. No, there was none of that at the time. So that's why I really felt compelled to lie, because I knew this was not the type of thing I could safely share with my bosses. because I knew this was not the type of thing I could safely share with my bosses. What did happen is that I ended up, my mother, who was watching and was at the time quite a prominent academic physician at Harvard and also very interested in her son's well-being,

got me in to see a shrink, a psychiatrist. And he diagnosed right away what was going on. Because I didn't have a sense of why this had happened. I knew it was a panic attack, but I didn't know why. And he asked me a question, which was, do you do drugs? I sheepishly said yes. And he he didn't say this, but he gave me a look that said, OK, asshole, mystery solved. okay, asshole, mystery solved. Now we know what happened. Just briefly as a backstory, I had started doing cocaine after spending a lot of time in war zones after 9-11. And I wasn't high on the air, but it was enough that ambient drug use was enough for my shrink to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to have a panic attack. So under his tutelage, I quit doing drugs and began quite intensive therapy for about 10 years. And in

the course of those 10 years, I started getting interested in meditation, in part because of his influence, although he doesn't meditate himself, and in part because I was just reading more broadly about mental health. And so when I started getting interested in meditation, I realized there was at that time a not very well publicized but quite robust body of scientific research that suggested that meditation could have a bunch of health benefits. And yet many of the books that I was reading about meditation didn't speak to me. I mean, I could get through it, but they were quite annoying. And so I wanted to write a book that used the F word a lot and told embarrassing stories. And so I led the book I wrote about it, which was called 10% Happier, which is now 10 years old. I led that book with the story of the panic attack and how it put me on this path

to discovering meditation and all of the interesting things that happened after that. And so that, though, was one of only the first times that you use moments of failure to kind of learn and generate new career paths and so on. You've also had a more recent example of this, which you've referred to as your career earthquake. So I'm curious what that was and how that failure has changed things for you. Well, thank you for pointing out that I continue to fuck things up on the regular. I appreciate that. This is an episode about how to fail better. And I feel like of folks who fail pretty well, you are definitely one of my favorite

examples. So I'm nailing it. I am nailing it. Yeah, I mean mean just one thing to say by way of context because sometimes people say to me you know you are quite anxious for a an alleged happiness expert or a quasi self-help guru and and to me that like gets the causality wrong i i and i have become an expert or a quote unquote expert in this stuff. I would say not as much of an expert as you, you know, in that I'm not a scientist and I don't have a full grasp of the research in the way you do. And we'll talk about some of that coming up. But I am a flawed person. I continue to be a flawed person. And I would and I try to be open about that as a way to normalize other people's flaws.

There's an expression, I don't know who said this, but this expression, cathartic normalization. And that's like my whole brand. I'm just a journalist who's been meditating for a while and very interested, you know, on my own podcast in all ways in which we can do life better. But that doesn't mean that I'm perfected. And I'm very suspicious of people who present themselves as perfect, just to give that context for the next story that you're teaming up to tell, which is that after I wrote 10% Happier, I did not expect it to turn into anything. I remember Barbara Walters, then a major figure in broadcast news, explicitly telling me when I told her what I was writing my book about,

don't quit your day job. Yeah, so that gives you an idea of what the culture was like. So I didn't go into the publication of that book with anything other than fear. But I certainly, I didn't think, I mean, I harbored some fantasies that it would. But I certainly I didn't think I mean, I harbored some fantasies that would be successful, but I didn't really think it would happen. And it just turned out that it came out at the right time, right when meditation was starting to get cool again. And right when we were starting to be more open about public health, mental mental health issues publicly, and ABC News really got behind the book and so it took off

which was amazing and it led to a bunch of opportunities including starting a meditation app which was called 10 happier and so that that company was around for about eight years under the name 10 happier in recent years i developed a series of interpersonal and creative and financial differences with my co-founders who are excellent people. There's no bad guy in this story. If there is one, maybe it's me. Just to say, I take 50% of the responsibility at least for this failure. I do want to say that they are continuing to operate the company. So I don't want to call the company a failure. It still exists.

It's called the Happier Meditation app. So it's no longer called 10% Happier. But the separation from the company was incredibly difficult for me. I experienced a lot of anger and fear and frustration. And there were many times where I lost my temper and I lost my ability to sleep for several years. You know, I really took a significant toll on my mental and physical health. If you look at pictures before this, I mean, I had way fewer gray hairs. So this is one of the hardest things I've ever gone through, you know, because I considered the company to be my baby and I don't have it anymore.

I think this story is really profound because it illustrates a number of the different kinds of ways that failure can affect us. I mean, a big one is just the effect that failure can have on our health, right? Like you're not sleeping, you're not eating. Like, I mean, you've talked about this really bluntly that like, you just didn't basically sleep at all for several years while this was going on. But an even bigger one that I think I hear in your story is this idea that failure can really affect our identity, like our sense of who I was. And this seems to be a big one in your story. You'd stepped away from this role of being a kind of news person for ABC. You became this kind of co-CEO of a company. And now all of a sudden, that identity seems to be kind of falling apart,

or at least generating lots of conflict. How did you handle that? Not well. And I do want to hear some stories from you about, I'm not aware of any failures on your end, but to the extent that they've happened, I do want to hear about them if you're comfortable talking about it. But I will say that you nailed it. I mean, you're pointing at it. One of the big points of struggle for me was the identity piece of this. It was embarrassing to, even though the struggle behind the scenes lasted for nearly three years, it wasn't public, but, you know, the people in my life knew about it. And I knew eventually it was going to be public. And I was embarrassed. I'm supposed to be, you know, Mr. Mindfulness. And here I am

embroiled in this, you know, protracted conflict. And yeah, I felt like a fraud, honestly. And I felt very helpless that I couldn't wave a magic wand and make this go away, because there were two parties at the table. And we had a lot of contracts that we had signed that needed to be unwound. And I couldn't just make things happen my way. And so, you know, I wasn't sleeping. I started having panic attacks again and I'm still dealing with the reverberations of that. You know, the panic attacks this time really started to come in situations of claustrophobia,

which my shrink, my current shrink has had a field day with. And so, you know, I'm still struggling to get on planes and in elevators and I'm doing it, but you're absolutely right. It took a big toll and especially on the, on the identity front, not only did I feel embarrassed as, um, you know, a mental health spokesperson of sorts to, to be in this situation. But as you, as you mentioned, I had retired from ABC news, uh, now about three years ago. And it was right after I retired from the news that the problems started coming up with my co-founders. And so I no longer have my news anchor identity. And now this app

that I had like poured so much of myself into was, is no longer mine. And yeah, so that's all been very challenging. But one of the reasons we're having this conversation is that you've managed to do really cool things from this moment of kind of career earthquake. And also you've learned a lot. And those are the kinds of learnings that we're going to get to when the Happiness Lab gets back from the break. Workplaces can be this sort of spot that we generate lots and lots of happiness, but they can also be these places where we experience failure. So I think kind of looking really carefully at the kinds of ways that we get failure wrong and the ways we can benefit from failure can be really important. can be really important. And I think one of the biggest teachings that it sounds like you've come up with or you've talked about on your show is this idea that even though failure is really scary and it's got all these terrible elements, it's not actually as bad as we think. Like there are benefits that can come from it. Explain what you mean there. Many benefits. As somebody who fails

regularly, I can tell you there are many benefits. And I actually think that we might even want to play with that word. I don't know what an alternative is, but maybe it's something in the range of experimentation. You know, I think we live in a pandemic of perfectionism, and I'm sure you see this on campus with your students. Perfectionism is really on the rise, and it is such an insidious thing. People are unwilling to take risks because they don't want to fail. A part that I think this is because we live our lives so publicly on social media, this kind of panopticon we've created for ourselves where everybody can see what we're doing. We feel so much pressure to present a curated, perfected version of ourselves when, of course, our lives aren't like that. And then, of course, we're comparing ourselves to other

people's lives that seem perfect. And we know that we're a mess. And so something must be uniquely wrong with us. And one of the many, many pernicious impacts of this is that people are unwilling often to take risks and to run experiments. And a big part of running experiments and taking risks is you're going to fail. But to reframe that, you know, there's a difference between humiliation and humility. You can be humbled in a good way in that you've learned something about yourself and about the world, as opposed to humiliation, which kind of coils you up in thoughts about yourself, where you're stuck in shame, you're stuck in your own, as I sometimes

say, and I think I said this the last time I was on your show, that your head's up your ass in a pretty profound way. And I know that's kind of a gross image, but when you're in that mode, it's hard to learn. But when you can be in a mode of humility or to use a term from your milieu, of humility or to use a term from your milieu, when you've got a growth mindset, which is that you're willing to take risks and a failure doesn't mean somehow you are unworthy or perpetually incapable. It just means you learned a thing and you can grow from it. Does that all land for you, given what you know about the research? Yeah, completely. I mean, I think the growth mindset idea is really quite apt, right? I think we don't often enough kind of put the word yet at the end of everything we do, right? You know, I, you know, started a, you know, new meditation company, and it hasn't really worked out yet,

right? You know, I quit my job and tried to do something new in the field, but it hasn't worked out yet. You know, Carol Dweck's research suggests just putting that word yet at the end just completely reframes the way you're thinking, right? Because it's not like, well, I've screwed up, you know, everything's over, I'm dead. It's like, oh, it just hasn't hasn't clicked yet, right? There's some time for this to kind of work out. And I've learned something. So I'm more likely to get it the next time because I've sort of figured it out. I think that mindset shift is kind of huge. I think another mindset shift that's really big, and it seems like one that you've embraced a bit, is just this idea that like, it's actually not as bad as we think, right? That like, ultimately,

you're probably going to be okay, right? This sort of stems from some of the lovely work by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues about how bad we are, what he calls affective forecasting, which is just like predicting how bad some bad event is actually going to be. We have so many mechanisms in our mind to make it go a little bit better that it's really never as bad as we often think. That's so well said. You know, we've interviewed one another many times over the years, but actually we haven't spent, I don't think, any time in person. So I don't know you that well. We have this kind of, i have this kind of parasocial relationship with you but for observing you from a distance it seems like your career is just a progress of strength to strength to strength you know starting this course which is the most popular course that's ever existed at yale and then starting this podcast which is so huge but have you encountered

professional setbacks that you'd be comfortable talking about? Oh, my gosh, of course. I mean, one of the biggest ones was that, you know, as I was starting this big class and starting this podcast, and running a residential college at Yale and doing all this work, I got incredibly burned out, like so burned out that I wound up taking time off my role as being a head of college, which was embarrassing for all the reasons that you just talked about, right? I'm supposed to be the self-help guru, and here I am completely burned out. And the form of my burnout was a particular one, which is that I got incredibly cynical. So these clinical psychologists who talk about burnout often talk about these sort of

three features of burnout. One is the one we usually think about where you're emotionally exhausted. And I was for sure that, right? You take a weekend off and you come back Monday morning, you're just as depleted as when you'd started before. Like I was feeling that. I was also feeling what they call a sense of personal ineffectiveness. That even if I was doing my job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't be good enough or I wouldn't be proud of it. This is all going down kind of at the tail end of COVID when just doing things on campus generally wasn't very fun. But the particular insidious consequence of burnout that I was experiencing that I was most embarrassed about was what researchers called depersonalization, which is kind of just a form of cynicism, which is like everyone that you work with and care about is getting on your last nerve and you want to just explode on them all the time. You even start viewing their intentions as kind of evil

or like just a pain in the ass. And this was what I was experiencing with my students, right? I'd get an email from a student who, you know, had to get a root canal and needed, you know, some money from the college to be able to do it. And my instant reaction wasn't just like true compassion for the student, which is what I like to think was the typical reaction for most of my career. My reaction was like, oh, what a pain in the ass. Like, I have to send these other emails. And when I started noticing this, like, at first, I didn't want to tell anybody

because I felt kind of like a fraud. I felt a little bit ashamed for having those emotions, right? Like, I'm supposed to be in this role where I have utter compassion for the students in my community, and I wasn't feeling it. But I think in part because of my training in some of this stuff, I'm mindful enough to notice these signs, right? I'm like, wait a minute, this is like a huge flashing emotional signal that's not supposed to be there. That's telling me I'm overwhelmed, and I need to take some time off. So yeah, at the kind of realizing that I stepped away from my role as a head of college on campus, not as public that use it wasn't like on live TV, but I had a front page New York Times Magazine article about like, that I stepped away from my role as a head of college on campus. Not as public that you is,

it wasn't like on live TV, but I had a front page New York Times Magazine article about like, happiness professor burned out. I got a call from my mother-in-law who was like, were you going to tell us that you're like stepping away from your role and taking a year off? So yeah, so, you know, I think we all have our own forms of what feels like failure, what feels like us not living up to our ideals. And that was definitely a moment for me where I was feeling that way. So I can relate to the F word, not the F word we keep talking about, the failure F word. That's an incredible story.

I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but I'm like proud of you for telling it. I don't mean that in a patronizing way at all. It's just it's like very brave. Other than taking time off, what helped you pull out of it? Well, taking time off was huge. And I took time off in a big way. Like I just left Yale for a year. I moved to Boston, just like hold up with friends, just kind of restructured my life around thinking about the podcast and stuff,

but not doing a lot of my professorial work. And that changed a lot. You know, I mean, therapy was part of it too, right? As like, you know, as it always is. But it was really trying to focus on like, what have I been telling everybody to do? And what would I tell myself in this situation? And for me, I think the difference, which kind of gets back to a lot of the stuff that you've talked about was that, you know, it was the normal stuff that I teach students, these behavioral changes, right? Like engage in more social connection and exercise and try to focus on your sleep. But a lot of it was changes to my self-talk, right? A lot of it was changes to kind of that crappy drill sergeant voice in my head telling me I have to be the perfect happiness expert all the time.

I was like, you know, embracing Kristen Neff's self-compassion work in a huge, huge way. And that honestly was a lot of what has helped a lot, right? And that is one of the reasons I feel like I've overcome my burnout enough to kind of get back into the classroom and do more work at Yale and really kind of get back to this work in a different way. It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly, in a different way. It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly, modeling failure and the resilience. I just don't want that to slip by. It's awesome that you've done it. And now you're back in the classroom. That's a huge deal. I also just want to, you know, plus one on the work of Kristen Neff, self-compassion, which always scanned to me as a, you know,

I'm going to use some social justice boilerplate here, but always scanned to me as, you know, as a heteronormative cis male, as beyond the pale cheesy. stir a pretty convincing amount of research backing for the argument that if you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, you know, it can make you much more effective. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but I can't help say my favorite example of Kristin Neff's work that I think really shows how powerful and how not kind of wooey this sort of technique is, is her lovely work showing that if you teach self-compassion techniques to combat veterans, they're less likely to get PTSD. And I love this study because it gets around what I sometimes find is a challenge talking about the self-compassion work, which is that it has really crappy marketing, if we're being really honest,

right? It sounds sort of like fluffy and self-compassion-y and like you're going to talk to yourself like a friend. And I remember talking about this work in front of folks from the military. I was doing a talk for Navy SEALs. And you could see the faces in the audience where I'm putting this up of like, you know, talk to yourself. It's all about self-kindness. And they're rolling their eyes. But then you show the data where it's like, actually, when you train folks in the military to be a bit more mindful, to kind of stop the drill sergeant in their head, even though they're listening to the drill sergeant on the field. Now, all of a sudden, they start performing better. They wind up healthier in the face of true conflict and really terrible circumstances.

Now it starts to seem less kind of woo-woo and a little bit more like science-y and in the trenches. Absolutely. Absolutely. And for me, it's again, as somebody who's probably whose factory settings are closer to somebody who's in the military, although physically I never would have cut it in the military, but I'm a little bit psychologically closer to me. It was more like switching up from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. And we've all had good coaches and they don't shy away from pointing out where our flaws are and when we've made mistakes, but they're just not assholes about it. And that's what's being called for here. Not some sort of gooey, gooey, you know, staring in the mirror and talking to yourself and kissing the mirror and talking about how great you are. It's really about having a dry-eyed, clear-eyed, but warm sense of self-appraisal and talking yourself through it. Again, the way you

would with your kid or a good friend if they called you in a moment where they were in extremis. And that's really helpful. And I would add on top of this, and I'm sure you know his work way better than I do, but I have found as a supplement to Kristen Neff's work, and this is all very relevant to how you talk to yourself in failure, is Ethan Cross from the University of Michigan and all of the work he's done specifically looking at how to most effectively talk to yourself. Yeah. And just the simple way that you can do that by using your own name, or as I know you do, Dan, not Dan, but dude. Hey, dude, what are you doing?

It's fine. It's going to be all right. Let's take a long view. It's probably not as bad as you think, right? Yeah, those types of techniques have been really, really huge for me too. Another one that I know you've talked a lot about in the podcast that I think is something that's resonated with both of our stories of failure is how you navigate negative emotions and whether you allow them in. I think I wouldn't be in a healthier place than I was when I was feeling my maximal burnout right now if I didn't really allow the emotion of

overwhelm, if I didn't like sit with it and notice it, which is definitely not my instinct, right? As like a, you know, hardcore type A academic at Ivy League University, I'm a very kind of stiff upper lip, squish that emotion down. This is very inconvenient. I'm going to ignore it and sort of power through. But like actually noticing how depleted I was feeling as awful as it was feeling was sort of really essential for kind of getting better. And my understanding is that this has been part of your story, too, this idea of kind of embracing those negative emotions rather than running away from them. Absolutely. I'm curious, like, what modalities did you use? Was it therapy? Was it meditation?

What were your practices that helped you, like, not be at war with your own inner reality? Partly therapy, partly a lot of this just focus on noticing what my thought patterns were. That hasn't for me come so much through like more formal meditation practices, but a lot of these sort of maybe informal self-talk practices of just kind of noticing it. I think I mostly felt it in my body, right? It was sort of helpful that this was during COVID time and you're sort of trapped in your house. I feel like I was able to notice my body more. I wasn't traveling around and I wasn't as busy kind of as I in the typical way that I was. And so it just helped to sort of notice that a little bit more. But yeah, for me, it was pretty, pretty embodied to just kind of feel it and notice it.

Yeah. I mean, to me, that all sounds great. I know that I'm known as, to the extent that anybody knows who I am, as kind of Mr. Meditation. And I really am a deep believer in the power of the practice, but I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. What I would say, however, in this regard, in this particular sphere of being able to sit with your emotions, which is a really counterintuitive but powerful skill. Meditation for me has been a, it goes right at that. It is with extreme prejudice, it goes right at this value proposition of being able to weather your own internal storms by giving you a set of tools to sit in the middle of it without being owned by it. One little phrase that might be useful that

people could use as an inner slogan or a mantra in this regard, whether you meditate or not, is, and this comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's, in my opinion, just a brilliant, brilliant human being. And he teaches with these little phrases, these little slogans that are kind of like earworms. And for me, they really come up in moments when I need them. And so this one is going to sound very basic and simple, but it's profound. And it is this. It's okay. Now, this does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay to feel what you're feeling right now. You can handle it. Instead of pushing it away, which doesn't work, or getting overwhelmed by it and acting out of it, you know, meaning

inviting in the anger and then nurturing it and living in that space for 20 years or whatever. It just means that, you know, the half-life of an emotion is whatever, 45, you probably know this, like 45 seconds or something like that. We tend to make the emotion last for days, years, a lifetime. But actually, if you just tell yourself, it's okay, I can feel this anger right now, it will naturally come and go. And there is extraordinary freedom on the other side of it. When you realize, okay, I didn't do anything. I didn't say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage. My son and I are in a hotel room right now. And we ordered cronuts because we're in Vegas and they deliver cronuts to the room. And I'm looking at a cronut right now. And if I was angry and not aware of it or

unwilling to sit with it, I might just eat the whole cronut, right? Which again, I don't want to make food sinful or anything like that. But you can do lots of things that won't feel good ultimately, like say something pointed to somebody or eat when you're not hungry. And instead, it's okay. Like I can just feel this discomfort for 45 seconds or however long it lasts. It will pass. It'll probably come back again, but it will pass. And once it's passed, you can make better decisions. And you can also see that you can survive more than you think you can. I love it's okay. Can I tell you my latest earworm that I'm loving a lot? It comes

from the clinical psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, who has this great new book called How to Be Enough. But she says we have to go less frozen and more beetles. That when we think of dealing with our negative emotions, we want to let it go, but we have to let it be. I love this idea, because I've never been a huge frozen fan. So less frozen, more beetles, not let it go, let it be. Because I think this idea is we think, well, just like get rid of those emotions or try to toss them out. But the sad thing is that the real practice is being like, nope, I'm just going to hang out with you. I'm not going to run. I'm just going to let you take your course. And that can be super scary. And our instinct is just to squish it down and push it away. But it's really

the act of sitting through the emotion that allows us to get through it. And sometimes that allows us to see that the emotion we thought it was isn't exactly what it was. And I know this is something you talked a lot about in kind of your career earthquake is that the first presentation of a lot of the emotions you were dealing with was anger, anger at the company, anger at the situation or the contract or whatever. But what did you find out when you sat with the anger? Did it stay anger all the time? That's a great question. First of all, just to say I love Ellen Hendrickson, too. I didn't know she had a new book, so I need to get her on my show. But she wrote a book years ago about social anxiety that I still quote to people who are struggling with that. Yes, anger, for me,

when I sat with it, I realized that it's often described as a secondary emotion, as you know. So it's often covering up for something else. And for me, if I could muster the wherewithal to sit with the discomfort of the anger, I could see that underneath it was fear. And that's a hard thing. Again, it just kind of goes back to how masculinity can manifest. I know for men, for many men, we don't want to admit that we're scared. And so anger is a much more comfortable place to be. A friend of mine once joked that he had two emotional gears, anger and self-pity. And I really see myself in that.

But, you know, as painful as it is, it's better, I think, to tune into what's really going on than to just be stuck in the anger. Because you're much less likely, in my experience, to get to resolution if you stay in the anger. But to tune into the fear, like, what am I worried about? I'm worried about all the identity stuff that you brought up earlier. What is this all going to say about me? I'm worried about, am I going to have to sell the house and move my family somewhere else? Lots of things I was worried about. And I have, you know, for me, this is actually something that makes failure such a fraught issue, especially at work. I have this really,

I think this really deep ancestral fear of destitution. And it's totally irrational. I am absolutely comfortable financially. I've had every advantage that is available, except for maybe the fact that I'm not tall. But, you know, white, straight, male, raised by loving parents who are upper middle class, was able to go to college, all of the advantages. And yet I just, I have this nagging, irrational fear about running out of money and have learned later in life that I had a great grandfather. His name is Arthur Lebow. He was it was Lebowitz, but he changed it to Lebow because it wasn't a great place for Jews in the early 1900s. And the United States wasn't. And he wanted to sound French. And he was a total, like, huckster. And, you know, had a series of failed businesses, and then ultimately became a bail bondsman, but a

corrupt one, and was putting up his family members' houses as collateral for these crooks to get out of jail. And one of them skipped bond, and this guy the fbi swooped in and i might uh i found a bunch of articles about this like the fbi swooped in my great-grandmother had to like testify in federal court and arthur labow took his own life in the family kitchen and his daughters found oh my gosh yeah and that dude's energy is in my veins and that's just the best explanation I can come up with for why I, or at least part of why this is such a bugaboo for me. And so in failure, I've had the opportunity to get a little bit closer to this dude. And for me, what's really helpful is to be like, when I see him rearing his head, thank you. You know, thank you.

This is, I don't, you're giving me shitty ideas. I'm not going to, hopefully I'm not going to act on them. But the impulse is, as one of the great meditation teachers I know, a guy named Jack Pornfield, the impulse is just the organism trying to protect itself right so it fundamentally is a helpful instinct to have all this fear or to be like hustling all the time to like make sure that my career is in a good place but over time if i if i've as i've been able to like make peace with this character internally i'm less owned by him it's a kind of radical disarmament. Does all that make sense to you? No, totally. I think there are two things in there that really fit with the science, right? The first is this idea of kind of having gratitude for this belief that's otherwise causing this

terrible scarcity mindset, maybe causing you to make bad decisions. But if your instinct was to hate it, which I'm sure probably is your natural instinct, but if you kind of went with that instinct to hate it, and you're just angry at it the whole time, like you wouldn't ever be able to kind of look at it and allow it and see what it's doing. Like so kind of embracing it with gratitude is a really great strategy, right? It kind of allows you to look at it and really deal with that belief and sort of ask the question, is it really useful to you? It's trying to help you, but is it really helping you? I think another thing I really love about this story is that by kind of putting that in Li Bao's words, that it's his thought, it gives you some distance from that thought yourself, right? You're able to think of it as like, that's a belief.

It's not an objective truth about the world. It's a belief that I can sort of see the origin story. And you can almost label it as sort of one of his beliefs, kind of it's your ancestral belief, right? It doesn't have to be yours right now. You can pick and choose whether or not it's right for you. And that's a sort of classic distancing strategy that you get from cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, folks like work like folks from Ethan Cross and so on. And so I think there's elements there that the science would really line up with that that's a great strategy. This is why it's always so great to talk to you because you can take my crazy shit and like give it some scientific veneer. It's true. That's what the researchers would say you should do anyway. The final thing I want to talk to you that I was really impressed with your story about failure is this kind of optimism that you brought to it, at least sort of in the end part of the process.

And you talked a lot about trying to sort of embrace this whole situation with what you called radical optimism. And so I'm curious if you could define what that means and how it sort of played out in your story. You know, I don't, anybody listening to this, including you, you can fact check me on this, but my understanding, and really this comes from interviewing a guy named Frederick Fert, P-F-E-R-D-T, who was an innovation maven, or is an innovation maven at both Stanford and Google. And he talks about radical optimism as the idea that failure, and we talked about this earlier, is embedded in failure is progress if you are willing to learn from it. So you can launch a big project. And for me, like I just launched a big new project in the aftermath of 10% Happier, the app not going my

way. And in my sanest moments, in my most radically optimistic moments, and this isn't like, this is not irrational optimism. This is radical optimism, right? So it's actually evidence-based, fact-based, reality-based. I can tell myself the story that this thing may not work, but I will have made progress anyway because I will have learned for the next thing. I love that this comes from like all the Stanford tech folks, because this has been kind of an ethos that has never been kind of my MO,

but seems to be an MO that really works if you judge from companies like Facebook and Google and so on, which is like, move fast and break things, right? I'm cool with the move fast, like that kind of fits with my MO pretty well. But the break things, I'm like, oh, that, but it's like explicit in the kind of plan for how you live your life and come up with ideas and so on. And inherent in that is just the idea of what you were just saying, right? Which is that, like, you have to break things to learn what actually works. If the thing just kind of works perfectly the first time you design it, then you haven't really learned much of anything in terms that will matter for your kind of product working well

or in the case of our own psychology for our own resilience moving forward. Yeah, I would say the one asterisk there is that in my understanding, at least too often in the tech world, they're breaking things and breaking people and acting, you know, maybe without, you know, the highest integrity sometimes. And so this isn't about, and I'm not saying this to you, I'm saying it just to anybody who might be tempted to misinterpret this. This isn't about, you know, just being a dick or, you know, or not giving a shit about other people or burning yourself out and other people out.

It's really like moving fast and break things the way I interpret it for myself is a willingness to fail, a willingness to try things. And yeah, this is another Silicon Valley cliche that I like, to fail fast, to try a bunch of stuff and then pivot quickly. And there's just an enormous amount of resilience available to you if you're open to having erred. Yeah. And not to beat the crap out of yourself when you do that. Right. Because it's hard to fail fast if you're in the fetal position crying about what a loser you are. Right.

Yes. The trouble with talking to you, Deanna, is that we cover so much ground that when I'm in the position of summing up, it feels like there's a lot to do. But I think first bullet point in my sum up list is that you and I both screw up a lot and we like to learn from our screw ups and then share what we learn with lots of people. And so thank you for helping me out with that.

But it seems like among the things we've learned is that failure, not as bad as we think, lots of benefits we don't expect. If you're feeling terrified about failure, that's probably just an affective forecasting error coming up. But if you need tips to deal with failure, self-compassion, the catch-up of all self-talk strategies, it just makes everything tastier and better. We need a little bit of radical optimism so that we can kind of remember that failure is probably not just not as bad as we think, but also going to be really helpful. And beyond that, we need some strategies to kind of really allow our negative emotions and to remember that it's going to be okay. You're the

career journalist. What did I forget? I think that that was a perfect sum up. And I would add very quickly, one other thing, you know, for people wanting to navigate failure successfully is make it a team sport, you know, have people you can talk to about it. Super. Dan, thanks so much for being so frank about your failure and for helping me be so frank about mine. This was an awesome episode. Thank you, Lori. I love talking. And next time, we're going to come back and talk more about well being at work, we're going to focus more specifically on the recommendations that came out on World Mental Health Day about what we can do as individuals and maybe also as employers to make sure we're thriving at work.