The One You Feed - Leah Weiss on the Power of Mindfulness in the Workplace

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

Please Support The Show with a Donation Leah Weiss wears many hats: she's a researcher, professor, consultant, and author. Much of her work to date has surrounded cultivating compassion in the workplace. Her upcoming book, to be released in March 2018, ventures into the realm of bringing mindfulness into the workplace. It turns out, it's not only possible to do so, but it completely transforms the way people experience their work for the better. Hate your job? This interview is PERFECT for you. But you don't have to hate your job to get a lot out of it. Leah Weiss can help you elevate your experience at work no matter your starting point of happiness. In This Interview, Leah Weiss and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHer book How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity and Embrace the Daily GrindThe importance of and impact of our experience at workMindfulness: the intentional use of attentionThe illusion of multitaskingLooking differently at what we're already doing vs doing something differentlyTaking all of your life onto the pathHow mindfulness helps you transform the experienceThe importance of directing our attention to something we've been avoiding because it's painfulHow the strategy of avoidance or resistance leads us to be more unhappyThe three types of mindfulness training that we can bring to workBeing in your bodyMetacognitionFocusThe Pomodoro TechniqueOur crazy streams of consciousnessEudaimonic happiness vs Hedonic happinessA helpful strategy for dealing with people who annoy you - in life and at work Please Support The Show with a Donation See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Multitasking doesn't exist. There's only task switching. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the

right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Leah Weiss, PhD. Leah is a researcher, professor, consultant, and author. She teaches courses on compassionate leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is a principal teacher and founding faculty for Stanford's Compassion Cultivation Program, conceived by the Dalai Lama. She also directs compassion education and scholarship at Hope Lab. Her new book is How We Work, Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind.

This episode is sponsored by Warby Parker. Go to warbyparker.com slash oneufeed, that's all spelled out, oneufeed, to order your free home try-on kit. a paper called The Four Transformational Hacks That Make Habits Stick, Even If You've Tried Before and Failed. And if you're looking for a little bit more support in your life, go to oneufeed.net slash coaching, and you can get more information about our coaching program there. And here's the interview with Leah Weiss. Hi, Leah. Welcome to the show with Leah Weiss. And a lot of what I like about it is it's not about having to change necessarily your job, although that could be part of it, but a lot of it is how do we find peace and happiness right where we are.

And I love that theme. So we'll get into all that in just a minute, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred, fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, I think this parable cuts right to the heart of the work that I do actually, and to my personal mission. So I really appreciate it. The reason I say it comes right to the heart of it is because, you know, many of us have heard about Darwin. And for most people, you say, what did Darwin's philosophy boil down to? It's a survival of the fittest and have ideas about competition that nature selects for the most aggressive player in any situation. But what's interesting is that there's another side to that story, similarly to this parable that you were sharing, which is that Darwin was also very focused on this idea of sympathy, or what we would call compassion today, and the virtues of that for species that are trying to survive, the ability to cooperate, the ability to care for and successfully raise young. And what we call this is the notion of dual drives, so that we all have both, just like in the parable, we have the forces of aggression and competition, and we have the

forces of pro-social and compassion and cooperation. And basically, you know, one of the biggest findings from research in the last 30 years is that the extent to which our social context influences the directions that we go, which of the two we feed, to borrow on the language of the people. So I think it's a really exciting topic to explore. And the research and the work that's being done on what is it that allows us to feed ourselves and our communities and our organizations so we move in the directions we want rather than towards destruction. I love the way you said that. And, you know, Darwin was not really the, at least what we think of as social Darwinism, right? Didn't even come from Darwin himself. You know, it came from Herbert Spencer, someone after him. So I'm going to read a quote from early in

the book because I think it really sums up what the book is about and really puts all this in context. So it says, Partly because work is where we spend so much of our time, and partly because of its nature, nothing provides more opportunities than the workplace for us to feel discouraged, disappointed, bored, overwhelmed, envious, embarrassed, anxious, irritated, outraged, and afraid to say what we really feel. Like it or not, aware of it or not, we feel things at our jobs, and how we feel at and about work matters to us, to our families and friends who are impacted, to the quality of our work, and ultimately to the success of the organizations we work for. to the quality of our work, and ultimately to the success of the organizations we work for.

So that's a great way to kind of sum up the beginning of the book and really what you're after in the book. Is there anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I think that that passage really is the best summary within the book of what I think the opportunity is for when we take the effort to use work and all of the challenges there as the opportunity to grow as individuals and collectives. That's exactly what this book is about. And then getting into the how do you then take all of that onto the path? Yeah, and the word is not in the title of the book, but a big part of the book is about mindfulness, right? So that's one of the key techniques that you're advocating. And you go on to say that it's kind of in paying attention to our experience of work, even when it's dissatisfying or disengaging or ambivalence,

is really the first step to turning it around. And so by bringing mindfulness to work, we can transform it. Let's start off a little bit with you telling me how that mindfulness is going to help me change my experience of work. Absolutely. So, I mean, really, it's the root in a lot of ways of getting right to the heart of the issue. We are at work because there's something we're trying to get done, right, that somebody somewhere wants to pay for or fund in some way. And if we can't keep our attention, which many of us, let's get real, really struggle to do, if we can't keep our attention on the biggest priority, if we can't keep ourselves focused and moving on what needs to get done, that has a real cost for our organization. We struggle with

that. No one likes how it feels to at the end of a long workday, to know that you haven't really accomplished what was most important. It's a terrible feeling. It really is. It's amazing to me how true that is how it seems like a lot of times in the moment, like, oh, if I just, you know, I'm just gonna do something different,, right? But boy, it feels terrible afterwards. Yes, it does. And we get so habituated, many of us, to the types of decisions that grab our attention. You know, it may have started out that we sought the action to procrastinate something that we were, maybe we didn't understand how we were going to do it, or we didn't really

know what the goal was, or we didn't have the tools we needed. And then rather than facing that head on, we just directed our attention elsewhere. And then it becomes such a habit, we find ourselves incessantly checking our cell phones or social media, or, you know, the coffee break that runs on for on and on and on, or whatever our version, or just working, but working on the wrong thing. That's not the priority. You say that in mindfulness training, there is no separation between what is meaningful and what is mundane. Can you explain that? So the way I define mindfulness in the simplest form is the intentional use of attention, intentionally directing our attention. And if that's the training that we're working on,

there is no distinction between whether we're training ourselves to pay better attention, while we are, you know, working on a spreadsheet or creating widgets or having a conversation. Any of these are opportunities that we can use to leverage the neuroplasticity of our brains to be able to get better at unitasking rather than supporting this illusion of multitasking, which doesn't exist. There's only tasks switching and the costs thereof. So my point there is that we don't have to view the opportunity for our mindfulness practice to be the lovely meditation session we might have in the morning. It's actually equally an opportunity to deal with the thing I least want to do at work that day is also an opportunity to train.

That was one of the things I really liked about the book. You make a real point of this, that meditation is great, right? But you've got a line in there, you say, you know, an optimal intervention that no one in the real world can use is not very helpful. And not that people don't meditate, but a lot of people don't. And so you talk about a practice where we don't have to do something different, right? We don't have to add this extra thing into our lives. You say, we don't have to do something different so much as look differently at what we're already doing. And then you say, I had plenty of time to practice, I realized, because practice wasn't something I had to take time out of working or mothering or living to do.

Yeah. And I think that the tyranny of the shoulds for so many of us, we have long lists of things that we, you know, should be doing that, you know, for ourselves, let alone for the people in our lives, and then start looking at service and work. And if we make mindfulness another thing on a long list of shoulds, and then we're making choices like, am I exercising and taking care of my body? Am I meditating? And, you know, it's actually taking your body as well taking care of my it just becomes crazy making so what i really want to do is get out of this um setting impossible standards and try to understand the point of mindfulness which was never meditation meditation aims towards mindfulness it's not its own goal and i think this is something we've really gotten wrong

in the translation process of bringing these practices into secular context. There's a lot of great stuff happening, but I think over-prioritizing meditation and under-prioritizing the action element has been a real issue that I'm hoping to set straight. Right. Meditation is ultimately a tool to make the rest of our lives, at least in my opinion, better. And it's been one that's very important to me. And I always encourage people to try, but I agree with you 100% that that doesn't have to be the only way of doing this. And you bring up the Tibetan phrase, take all of your life onto the path. You know, this idea that we are able to be mindful anywhere we are. So what's the benefit of this? So okay, we're going to be mindful.

Boil that down to how that helps me. I've got a job and I go in and it stinks every day. And I'm frustrated. How does being mindful help me to transform that experience? Well, this is the kind of question I would much rather people focus on than the tyranny of the, I should meditate because there's a million evangelists or the data. I think that this is the right approach. So asking ourselves, what's going wrong in this job that I don't want to go to? And using mindfulness to just bring our curiosity to that question, it might not seem like such an attractive question. But you know, you're an experienced coach. And I'm sure in your work with your clients, there's got to be this discovery

phase that each person goes through, where they direct their attention towards they'd been avoiding seeing because it was painful but that's the only way that we can then see what the problem is and see what the solutions might be so our strategies of avoiding are just leading us to being becoming more unhappy um and actually like biting the bullet and looking in our day like, okay, if I don't, I'm dreading the Sunday night blues every night of the week. Really feeling that, you know, and then when we get to work, like where are the points in our day where the dread or the anxiety really rises? Maybe it's not as pervasive as we thought, or maybe there's specific activities and just getting clear on that, then we can be equipped to take action.

that often is a cause of a lot of the pain and same thing at work. It's, it's not that the work itself is that unpleasant or difficult or all that for me. I mean, I've got a job in addition to doing this and I'd rather be doing this, you know, the podcast and the coaching, but that job is pretty wonderful when I have the intention to not resist it. But when I get into a place where I'm like, well, I really wish I was doing something different. And I can, you know, then all of a sudden it, that same job for me becomes very unpleasant. And it's all about my level of resistance. Now, I'm not saying all jobs are that way. Some are probably lousy in certain regards, but for me, I've been able to recognize it's in the dislike of it that I have it from time to time is almost entirely self-created. I think that's such a powerful point you're making in that this mindset piece of it is so important. And, you know, one of the studies that I think is really interesting, there's a researcher, Amy Ruznetsky, who teaches at the Yale School of Management.

And I write about some of her work in my book. And I write about some of her work in my book. And she does a lot around purpose at work and what you can do to cultivate a stronger sense of purpose, no matter what your job is, even if you're not, you know, your work, you're not the CEO of your dream job. But you're doing something that wouldn't have been your dream in your life, honestly. So she, she looks at all kinds of professions. And one of the studies I love where she interviews a number of the janitorial staff in hospitals, and she asks them questions around how do they perceive their work and within that job, which was probably nobody's dream from the time they were a little kid, but it's dignified work, they have benefits, they're supporting their family. Hopefully they're in organizations like that in these

hospital settings. And there was a whole range of answers. So my point is some of the people said, yeah, I do this to pay the bills and the dignity supporting my family and my extended family in many cases. Other people said, you know what, I actually view my work as instrumental to the care and healing. Because if I don't do my job, well, guess what infection is going to spread, and there can be disastrous consequences. So they really view themselves as part of the care team, people like that are more likely to then do what we call extra role behavior. It's their job to clean up the hospital room. But if they're there in the middle of the night, and a patient is awake and lonely, like there's many stories of developing relationships

that last after the hospital say, where people were so you know, in these kinds of roles, and I just find that really inspiring. So if that is possible, then how can I do that? How can I get more of that? How can we all do more of that? I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition sign Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. quality eyewear at a revolutionary price point. So this is really cool. They have something called the free home try on program. So you go online, they give you a little quiz to, you know, pick

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You've got a line that says, it doesn't mean that we all have to work for a good cause. It means we find the good causes all around us, the small opportunities for purposefulness, mindfulness, and compassion in everything we do. And I love that idea. There's another spiritual teacher that I like, and he talks about this idea of, you know, we think of purpose too narrowly. We think like, my purpose has to be like doing this one thing. And if I do that one thing, then it will be this expression of my values. And he sort of flips that on his head, sort of like you're doing, which is, no, if you do everything with your values, if everything you do, you bring your values or what's important to you into everything you do, then you're creating that purpose right

there out of everything. And that's essentially what you're driving at here. That's right. And then the trick, as you know, work as well as, you know, how did that come alive for different people? How do we make that something that is an exploration and an experiment that people feel like they can really engage in, rather than another thing at the bottom of a long to do list? Right, right. I often talk with people about, you know, there's a lot of people who want to make career changes. And I think it can often be a really good idea. And one of the things that I've noticed, though, that I wrestle with, and a lot of other people do is, I think there's some sense like,

if I hate what I do enough right now, that'll drive me to the next thing. And my experience has been almost exactly the opposite, that when I hate what I do, or when I have that attitude, I'm so drained that I don't have the energy to do all that other stuff. Whereas when I put everything I can into what I'm doing, it's sort of non-intuitive, right? You'd think like, if I don't spend so much energy on the job, then I'll have more energy outside the job. But my experience is it doesn't work that way at all. It's by giving my all there that I'm able to come out and not feel as drained and not feel as beat down. And then I'm better able to do all the other things in my life. Absolutely.

What do you tell people when they're in that situation and they're hating their job? And what are some of the recommendations you give? I'm really curious to hear. Well, I think it's very similar to what you're talking about. I mean, one is if there's something else you want to be doing and you know what that is, then let's explore that and let's chart a path towards it. But in the interim, right, how can you learn to care about what you're doing? How can you bring your values?

You know, if we say that, I think a lot of people, we get dissatisfied. Like you said, you know, we think we that, I think a lot of people, we get dissatisfied. Like you said, you know, we think we have to work for a good cause. We have to do this, you know, this very important thing, right? And so we think until we do that very important thing, that everything up to that point is unimportant. And my experience is, and I think that's absolutely not true. I think if our value, if the thing that drives us to want to do something purposeful towards the good cause, let's just say our value is we want to help other people. Well, in any job we have, wherever we are, as long as there's other people involved in any way, there's an opportunity right there to help other people. There's an opportunity right there to be

kinder or better. And so, you know, I think it's a multi-step approach depending on where somebody wants to go. But a lot of times it's, let's re-engage where you are. Let's try and bring your values into work that you do every day. Then see what this job looks like. How does it feel to you at that point? But I mean, a lot of it is very similar. It's why I loved your book. I was like, yeah, I really, you know, I relate with a lot of this. I mean, I think it's very, very well said. Thank you. So you say there are three types of mindfulness training that we bring into work.

One is embodiment. The second is metacognition. And the last one is focus. Can we go through each of those real quick? Absolutely. So the embodiment piece is for so many of us, if we're knowledge workers, you know, we're spending our time on computers and in meetings, it can be very easy to just feel like we exist in the top few inches of our head.

And we literally forget we have a body unless the body becomes like the traction from what we're trying to do. So, you know, we have pain or we have hunger or we have to use unless the body becomes like the traction from what we're trying to do. So, you know, we have pain or we have hunger, or we have to use the restroom, and then we remember we have a body. But, you know, one of the really interesting changes we can make is to just try to not be disembodied brains in a vat as we go through our workday and bring our attention back into our physical sensations and experience of work, which can give us really important information, you know, about our jobs, about when we've been doing a trade for a long time. We have all kinds of intuition that contains knowledge in it, in our bodies. And there's great examples of even the

economist, Nobel Prize winner, Kahneman, who wrote about intuition is recognition and the way that he describes that it's very much somatic physical recognition. He gives an example of a fire chief who goes into a burning house, and there's a bunch of his team in there and he tells everyone to get out immediately and they get out and the house blows up in flames. And it was because he felt sensations on the top of his ear that he recognized and knew meant that something was way more wrong in this house than anyone who was in the house had recognized. So it's just an example. You hear people in all kinds of fields like finance, investing, engineers talking about how there's all this information in their bodies. But if we're disembodied in our workday, then we can't draw on any of that. So that's one way of thinking about embodiment.

And the practice there is just practice bringing your attention. Can you do the same work while remembering that you are in a body, while feeling sensations, while paying attention to your posture, maybe switching up your work environment to a standing desk or different locations just to kind of keep yourself moving intermittently and all those kinds of good work experience hacks that that people use, we can use in our mindfulness as well. Metacognition is our ability to keep track of where our attention is while we're in a task. So this meta layer of, you know, when I talked about mindfulness is the intentional use of attention. Well, the only way we can really do that is if we are both paying attention to something, like I'm paying attention to this discussion with you, but I also need to be tracking on where my attention is. So if we're speaking

through the mechanism of a computer, if my attention starts drifting to my screensaver, metacognition is what allows me to check in, like, is my attention where it's supposed to be, and recalibrate when it moves off, which it will. So that's the second piece, the metacognition, aware of where, what we're thinking about, aware of what we're aware of. Meta-awareness is another term that sometimes is used interchangeably, which is like the bigger term than metacognition, because awareness includes sensation as well as thought, you know, the cognition piece. And then the last one is focus, which is really, I think, super practical

and so helpful. Just, you know, one of the ways I like to work with this one is just do little sprints in my day, like literally setting the timer for 25 minutes and saying, I'm going to monotask and work on X. And it might take me a few different chunks, but using something like this, I'm referencing the Pomodoro technique of setting these short bursts. I'm a big fan of it. Yeah. That's great. I mean, and it's powerful stuff. And the other thing is, it's not just helping us be productive. It's also helping us understand where the 50 other places my attention gets pulled during those 25 minutes. That is super interesting.

Yes, it is. I have found it to be so helpful. The other thing I found is like how much I can do in 20 minutes if I'm completely focused only on one thing. But you're right, it is easy to get a lot of things come up. I make sure I have a pad of paper with me so that when I get 15 different ideas, I'm like, I can just very quickly scroll them down instead of what I normally do, which is like, oh, let me look that up on Google. you know, and then I'm off. And so, yeah, it is a great way to work for sure. Yes. One of my favorite student papers I ever read, we were doing the mindfulness unit in the class I teach at Stanford and at the business school. And a student was reflecting on his meditation practice that week. And he said, I had the craziest experience. Like I looked up and it was an hour and a half later than he had sat down to meditate, but he never consciously ended the meditation session, even to say like, I'm not doing this. Like his point was that at some point

while he was meditating, he had gotten the idea and he just got up and pursued it without having the metacognition that he was, you know, acting out an idea. Not that following your ideas is necessarily bad, but it was just this huge aha for him. And I loved just the earnestness with which he described that because it was so relatable, like exactly what you're saying. I have an idea and instead of capturing it for a holding tank, I'm like, I'm Googling it, or I'm switching to do that task, or I'm doing 10. And I don't even make that choice. It just happens. It's fun sometimes in a slightly somber way for me to look back and be like, how did I even get

to where I'm at? Like, I'm, I'm researching, like, drop shipping of like elephant food or something. And I'm like, what chain of events led to me being on this webpage? And I can kind of think back and be like, wow, that was a whole lot of completely not really paying attention to what I was doing and just chasing the next shiny thing. It really is kind of amazing. And that ability to turn things off and to focus. And there's tools out there which I've used before. Like, all right, I'm going to block the following six websites. I mean, that's just what I'm going to have to do.

It's embarrassing sometimes to be like, I have that little control that I'm going to have to do it. But boy, is it helpful when I do. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it occurs to me as we're talking that it's like this, you know, when we're web surfing, and how did we end up on this site? But we can also like, reverse engineer, how did we get, you know, during any little period of time, the number of just disparate thoughts that we're having. And it'd be great if we could do a history on that, like we can on our web surfing, would be a it would be such an interesting exercise yeah plus you know i feel like the other corollary to this is like when we start realizing that that's what's going on for us all the time and then we stop and realize that's what's going on for everyone all the time and that's you know the people we work with everybody at home like we're

all we have all this much noise in the background, and it's invisible what's going on in someone else. But we know they've got a similar dynamic. I feel like that's a real moment of common humanity or compassion that can happen. Patience, maybe with other people, since I know, wait, I do the same thing. It's just part of our human condition. Right. Well, I think they early on in the, in the web, it was named very aptly when we talked about surfing the web. You know, it is that it is that sense of once you get up on the wave. Right. You're not paying attention to much else. It just keeps carrying you along. And so I think that was a pretty apt way to describe it from from way back when.

And it's so much worse now, so much worse now with social media and Facebook and all that. But enough of that. Those tools are also very useful. And, you know, the internet, we wouldn't be having this conversation or this show. So I'm not trying to say it's all terrible, but certainly can be a challenge for a lot of us. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really,

and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're enjoying this conversation, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We are nearing the end of it. Wish you could keep listening once the episode ends? Well, I've got some good news too. You can. The interview continues over at oneufeed.net slash support.

There, if you pledge at the $10 level, you'll get access to this additional exclusive content as well as many other bonus conversations that have been recorded with our guests. We really need and appreciate your support, so we hope you'll head over to oneufeed.net slash support and pledge to access this additional weekly content. And now, back to the interview. So I want to switch directions a little bit here before we wrap up. And I want to talk about, over time in history, there's been a discussion between sort of like a hedonic approach to happiness and a, you're going to have to help me pronounce it. I've seen the word written a hundred times, but I don't know how to say it. Eudaimonic? Sure.

Okay, got it. With the eudaimonic purpose, right? So one says, you know, the way to be happy is just to string a ton of good experiences together and keep stringing them together. And that's happiness. That's sort of the hedonic approach. And the eudaimonic approach is really more about what sort of meaning do I have in my life? And am I doing things that I think are important? And it's a deeper, some people would say more solid approach. And you mentioned a researcher by the name of Steve, and he does this, he does this study where he asks people about their happiness level, people who would be more of a hedonic style or more of a eudaimonic style. And he found that as far as purposes of self-reporting, those people tended to say

they had about the same level of happiness. If you looked at them, you couldn't really tell it apart by their rating of their own happiness. But if you looked at things like inflammation levels, antiviral and antibody levels, all of that stuff, the people who had a eudaimonic purpose

were in far better health in those regards than people that were sort of hedonic. And I'm assuming they, you know, controlled for things like if you're hedonic, you drink more alcohol or whatever. But I just was stunned by that on one level that our body knows the difference, even though if our conscious mind doesn't, it makes me think of the episode we released. I don't know when this one will come out, but recently with Alyssa Epple. And I know you mentioned that book, The Telomere Effect in your book. But it was another one of those where it's like our bodies know what's good for us, a lot of times better than our own conscious mind does. Yes. No, it's such an interesting point when they move in opposite directions, our body and our own

self-report, my own testimony to how I'm feeling. But on the micro level, the cells in my body are telling you a different story. And Elisa's work is fascinating. Yeah. I've asked, you know, a lot of number of different researchers, how they make sense of this people working across the board and different biomarkers, why this happens and what their their thoughts are on it. I've had exhaustive conversations with Steve Cole about this. And, you know, I think it's interesting because his path to doing the research that he's doing now, he started doing work early in HIV and AIDS and trying to look at really questions of resilience and social isolation and loneliness ended up being really big factors. And then which, if you look at the flip side of that, that comes back to things like social connectedness, and compassion and purpose, and all these other positive psychology kind of areas that we're interested in, in developing, I think it's a really exciting time for research. Because we're able to quantify beyond the self report. And I think for a lot of people, it is a motivator to

understand the implications of what they're doing mentally on their body, whether it's introducing meditation, or for people who aren't so into that, like the things we were talking about earlier, taking a good look at what is our mindset through our day, and what are the opportunities to practice reframing? Yep, I agree. I find that whole study or that whole area of study fascinating, because it's one thing to talk about all these things that we kind of believe are good for us, and we hear are good for us, but it's really interesting when they're seeing it at a cellular level at that level. It just adds another level of credence to what a lot of practices are. And I've said on the show a couple times, you know, I love it when something that's sort of an ancient practice that's been around for a long, long time. So it's been around a long time, that means that there's something to it, right? And then that is also tied together with my own experience of it being positive. And then scientific results that it's positive, it really gives me this feeling of solidity, like, okay, you know, this is something I feel like I can, I can get behind because there's just so many different things pointing at its usefulness. goal is to, you know, introduce practices in a way people can engage with them. We want to understand how they're going to work and what the impact will be. I think the trick then is,

how do we get beyond thinking about it to then doing it because the thinking about it isn't going to have the impact we're looking for. But it's an important step. It's an important step, for sure. Absolutely. And I think that that goes back to the earlier statement that you had about, you know, an optimal intervention isn't any good if nobody does it. And, you know, that's another of the themes of this show that comes up and shows up in the coaching work all the time, which is start small and build, right? If you say, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go from doing nothing to running five miles a day, it's not going to turn out well in most cases. And so, running five miles a day, it's not going to turn out well in most cases. And so we don't start with the optimal, but we can build there by starting really small. And I think that's a key piece.

So we're going to wrap up here in a second, but I wanted to end with a section where you talk about we all have somebody at work who drives us crazy. And then you talk about, well, practicing compassion towards those people. All right, well, that's an interesting concept. But you've got a process in the book of sort of a way to think through this. So I've got somebody driving me crazy at work. How do I work on changing my attitude towards that person? One really simple assignment that a lot of people find useful. I've been giving this for a number of years at the business school.

And they all have to do team projects where they all share a grade and many of them really care about their grades a lot. And inevitably in any team, there's a person who's being bossy and taking over or there's a person who's not pulling their weight and everybody has to compensate. So the assignment is like pick, pick someone you're working with. So you have to be interacting with them currently. And what I'm asking you to do, the only ask I have of you is each day, I want you to think about this person in their full humanity or in reflect and you can do this, I give them a menu of options. Maybe it's picture them as a little kid, learning to tie their shoes or picture their extended family and everything they've invested in them and how devastated they would be if anything harmed them or picture them having had some major disappointment. So taking any of this menu of humanizing reflections. And just every day, I want you to spend a few

minutes, think about this person who's driving you nuts, experiment with this menu of reframes. And then I want you to come back in a week and just talk about what happened. So I'm not pushing you to like them. I'm not pushing you to change anything behaviorally. It's just working on your own mindset intentionally every day with respect to someone you're dealing with. And the outcomes are unbelievable, you know, both in terms of sometimes it's the relationship. Often, it's just someone's insight about themselves that they were triggered by something that really was disproportionate, or there was something they could do to impact the situation that they

weren't seeing because they were so invested in their frustration and anger and righteous indignation. So I love that exercise. I try to do it myself, you know, with people that I struggle with. And if I have to interact with them, just even flash that kind of idea before we have our phone call or meeting, it can go a long way. Or during it, during the meeting, you know, just remembering. And even, you know, you can go a step further, just asking a little bit about their life. It doesn't have to be a lot, but just enough to humanize and get out of our mental rut of being stuck in seeing someone in a way that doesn't serve us or them.

Yep. I love that. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. The book was, it's excellent. It comes out in March. So we'll have links to where people can pre-order it, depending on, this will come out before March, I would imagine. So I'll have links where people can pre-order it. But thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Me too. Bye.

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