How to Thrive at Work

We can spend a lot of time working - and it gives us fulfillment, social interaction and fun - but still one in five of us say our workplaces are "toxic". And even the best jobs can sometimes be stressful and draining. So how do we set ourselves up to thrive at work?   

Former news anchor Dan Harris (of 10% Happier with Dan Harris and DanHarris.com) joins Dr Laurie Santos to explore strategies to be a happier employee and a better employer. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This special episode of the Happiness Lab is brought
to you by State Farm. Like a good neighbor, State
Farm is there. If you have a job, it's entirely
possible that you spend more waking hours at work than

(00:35):
doing anything else in your life, more time than you
spend with your family or enjoying your hobbies, or kicking
back and relaxing. Work is a big part of our lives,
but aside from just paying the bills, our job can
give us purpose fulfillment and a sense of belonging. One
survey by the American Psychological Association found that ninety two
percent of us think that our workplaces should actively support

(00:58):
our emotional well being. But that same survey found that
one in five of us describe our workplace as being toxic.
And what makes a job toxic, according to that survey,
those things like bullying, overwork, discrimination, and even loneliness. It's
therefore no surprise that this year's World Mental Health Day
was devoted to the idea of wellness in the workplace,

(01:20):
and so in the last of our special World Mental
Health Day shows, we're going to look at some recommendations
to improve our happiness at work. Joining me again is
Dan Harris. You probably already know Dan from his podcast
ten Percent Happier, but you should also check out the
fabulous new community he's developing at Dan harris dot com.
Aside from being a Titan of Happiness, Dan also has

(01:43):
lots of workplace experiences to draw from. For our conversation today,
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you
is that it seems like work is just gonna be
hard necessarily. There's like some situations at work that are
just naturally going to be hard. And one of the

(02:03):
techniques I know I've learned a lot from your work
on mindfulness is just this idea of like not fleeing
from the hard, or it may be a better way
to put it, is sort of radically accepting the hard.
And so what is radical acceptance? And why can it
be so helpful when we're experiencing stress at work?

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, just to say in an overarching sense of for me,
one of the biggest sources of stress and anxiety and
suffering has been work. Not to be overly gloomy about this,
I mean work its also been the source of so
much purpose and meaning and joy and connection and so
it's complicated. But to answer the question you actually asked me,

(02:41):
it's so counterintuitive because stress is unpleasant. So you know,
you want to self medicate with food or gambling or
TikTok or whatever it is. You want to push it away,
But that doesn't really work. It can work a little bit,
you know, obviously we need stress relief. But honestly, the

(03:02):
one of the great mechanisms, or one of the great
ways to think about this, is that the only way
out is through to feel the difficult feelings instead of
letting them own you.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
And there are.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Lots of ways to do this. For me, mindfulness meditation
is a great way. I'll just briefly describe it. There
are really only three steps for beginning mindfulness meditation. The
first is to sit comfortably and close your eyes. I
sit on a chair. You don't have to get into
the lotus position. The second step is to bring your
full attention to something neutral. Often it's your breath coming

(03:36):
in and going out. Some people don't like the breath,
so you can just pick the feeling of your body
sitting in the chair, or sounds in the environment. Just
picking something based in one of your senses that gets
you out of the spinning thoughts in your head and
into some sense based object of meditation. That's a technical term. Basically,
it's the thing you're focusing on, your object. And then
the third step is the most important, which is very quickly.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
As soon as you try.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
To feel your breath coming in and going out, you're
likely to get distracted a lot. And this is the
moment when many people tell themselves this story that they're
failed meditators. But actually my job on the planet is
to reframe this moment as success. The whole point of
meditation is not to feel some specific way or to
stop thinking to clear your mind. The point is to

(04:23):
become familiar with how wild the mind is, so that
the chaos and cacophony doesn't own you as much. So
that's what the practice is. The sit try to focus
on one thing very quickly, you'll get carried away and
you start again and again and again. It's like a
bicep curl for your brain, and it really changes the
structure of the brain. It's so interesting that this is

(04:45):
something that is available to us. It's such a radical
notion that we can have a different relationship to our
thoughts and emotions, and so to me, this simple but
not easy practice is a great way to learn how
to get comfortable with our inner meteorology, you know, our
inner storms, so that they don't own us as much.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
And so let's say your inner storm is really kind
of feeling like it's owning you because your stress at
work has just gone like through the roof. I was
just talking to a friend of mine, this's having a
really difficult time at work, and she talked about how,
you know, working out as much as I possibly can,
and I'm trying to engage in, you know, the best
sleep hygiene. Although I think we'll talk later about strategies

(05:27):
we can use to do that better. But like I
just am simmering when I leave the office. I'm just
like hating work. So she's going to sit down and
she's going to meditate. What does she do with all
those simmering feelings? What's the advice there?

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Well, just to say it is very common. I've had
this feeling many times. I remember in my twenty one
years at working of working at ABC News, I would
have this experience often of leaving there. There was a
our office was in the Upper West side of Manhattan.
There was a main entrance on sixty sixth Street and
a back entrance on sixty seventh and I used to
take that exit, and it's a very leafy upper West

(06:04):
side street. I used to take that exit and walk
to the apartment where that I shared with my now wife,
And I remember having this thought every time I left
and walked down this beautiful street.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
What was I so upset about? Why did I spend
this whole day in agony? Like what is going on?

Speaker 2 (06:24):
And so I really relate to this experience your friend
is having. And I don't want to say that meditation
is some sort of panacea. I'm not a meditation bully.
I think it's one of many options, and we'll talk
about a bunch of options. But how it can work
if you feel like doing it is that well. First
of all, I find it such a relief because it's
this dedicated period of time and it doesn't have to

(06:46):
be long.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
It could be a minute, two minutes.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
I tend to do a little bit longer twenty thirty,
forty minutes, but I'm like a semi professional. But it's
this one concentrated period of time where you don't have
to take your thoughts that seriously, and that is such
a relief. Over and over and over, you're sitting trying
to focus on something like the feeling of your breath
coming in and going out, and then you're ambushed by

(07:09):
all the simmering. But you know your job is to
eventually wake up. You might get carried away for a minute,
two minutes, three minutes with a whole session, but eventually
it's gonna end, and you're gonna wake up and realize, oh,
this is just a set of thoughts with accompanying physical
sensations that I can get increasingly familiar with, but they

(07:32):
aren't facts. One of the great expressions that my meditation
teacher Joseph Goldstein has is pretend your thoughts are coming
from the guy next to you, or from somebody you
know in the apartment across the way, or from the
cat that lean in the corner.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
These thoughts, which have so much control over us, are actually,
as Joseph says, little more than nothing. Unexamined, they they
blot out the sun. We believe them as facts, but
examined for what they are, they have way less power.
And so that's how sitting for me that at least
in my life. That's how sitting with the simmering can work.

(08:10):
Doesn't fix the objective facts of the situation. It can
change your relationship to those facts. And by the way,
the facts may not be so factual.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Yeah, and I think sometimes we can see that through
practices like meditation. I think they're for folks who struggle
with meditation. There are also other techniques we can use
to do that. I'm really taken by this idea of
cognitive diffusion, which are all these funny ways to kind
of see your thoughts as separate. I've heard a recent one,
which is to take the most annoying pop song that
gets stuck in your head and then sing your thoughts

(08:41):
to that song, which is or to watch your thoughts
on big Star Wars fan watch your thoughts kind of
scrolling up like the text of Star Wars, so it's
kind of going away. Yes, I mean, it seems like
those techniques are doing exactly the kind of thing you're
talking about with meditation, right, which is that you get
some distance from them you can sort of see them
as thoughts. But another way that meditation in particular, I

(09:04):
maybe even more so than cognitive diffusion, can be helpful,
I think, is to give some space to the simmering
part that has to do less with the thoughts and
more with the emotions. Right. I know my friend from
dealing with these job struggles as a whole host of
sets of frustration and a shed of shame that she's
kind of so pissed off at her job, and like

(09:24):
a kind of uncertainty. Right, the sort of scarcity mindset
that you and I talked about in the last episode.
There's just a whole host of yunky emotions that come
when you're experiencing some troubles at work. How can the
practice of sitting with these emotions.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Be really helpful because in your.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Investigation of the emotion.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
In other words, so you sit and you try to
feel your breath and then you get overtaken by this
blast of anger or regret or shame or whatever it is.
And then in that moment, the move is instead of
going back to the breath, just take a look at like,
what's happening? What is this thing I'm calling anger? So
it's a bunch of thoughts, but it's also maybe a
burning in my chest, some heat in my ears, heaviness

(10:07):
in my forehead, kind of taking with a seemingly solid,
monolithic thing called anger and putting it through a cheese grater.
Because you're picking it apart, you're disambiguating the constituent parts
of the anger, and in this way it doesn't have
as much power. You can actually see And now I'm

(10:28):
going to get a little bit mystical with you here,
but you can see that to call it your anger is,
in the words of one great Buddhist monk, a misappropriation
of public property.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
It isn't your anger.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Another way to think about this, and this comes again
from the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein. A little linguistic trick you
can run is instead of saying I'm angry, you can
say there is anger. You don't own any anger. Look
close your eyes and look for anything you own in there.
There's nothing you own. You are just a process, right,
And so anger is a passing storm and you don't

(11:06):
have to identify so deeply with it. You can see
it as again to meteorological phenomenon that is playing out internally.
And please tell me if this is making any sense.
But this is how this is how I relate to
all of it.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, I mean, I think you're pointing out two ways
that sort of sitting with our emotions can be really helpful, right.
One is kind of getting distance from the fact that
they're you. There's just something that exists. But the second
part is this idea of it as a process, right,
that it is changing in times when I've kind of
really tried to sit with certain emotions of mine. I
did this recently with something I was experiencing a lot
of sadness about, and I'm like, as much as I

(11:41):
really deeply don't want to sit with this sadness, which
is like sit with the sadness, and when you start,
it can feel so intense. You feel like this is
always going to feel this bad and this intense and
this painful. And then like within four minutes of meditation,
my mind is wandering off to other stuff. But I
quickly come back and notice like, oh wait, I'm not
experiencing the sadness as as sad anymore. My brain is

(12:02):
like in its stream moved on to something equally stupid
and made me rumutative, but it's not the sadness anymore.
And then I have this moment sort of shockle like,
well that's weird. Like a few seconds ago, I thought
this was going to stick around forever. And so I
think that's the kind of thing that I often get
out of It is less the kind of making sure
the anger is that sadness or whatever it's not me,
because I struggle with that to kind of seem that

(12:24):
it's not part of me. But maybe I should use
this technique of there is sadness as opposed to I'm
super sad right now. But what I do often is
experience is like, oh, this was not nearly as permanent
as I assumed this would be, This was not nearly
as intractable as I assumed it would be, and that
that part's been really helpful for me.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
That makes complete sense. And just to say, I think
something that you and I have in common is we'll
just throw lots of tools out there at people, and
as I often say, like view it as a menu,
not a to do list. Take what resonates with you
and abandon what doesn't. And just to emphasize what you
were saying, a less esoteric or mystical way to see
the benefits of tuning into your difficult emotions is that

(13:04):
they will pass and there's a lot of relief on
the other side of that.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
Can I jump into an other tool in the toolkit
that I know you've talked about, a technique that I
know you've talked about as in terms of knowing your motivation,
which I think can be especially helpful when things on
the job seem just like overwhelming, you're not even sure
why you work there anymore. So what is knowing your motivation?
And what are some ways that we can engage in
that technique?

Speaker 2 (13:27):
To me, this is huge and very interested after I
say a few words to hear what if any science
there is on this. And I'll just say from the beginning,
like under, the idea of like having an intention always
struck me as pretty treacly or saccharin or just didn't
speak to me.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
And yet you know, I'm very.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Definitely, deeply influenced by the Buddhist tradition or the many
Buddhist traditions, and there's a lot about setting an intention
in your mind, getting clear on what your motivations are,
like what matters most to you as a north star
that can keep you going through the inevitable ups and

(14:07):
downs of life. And so I've spent a decent amount
of time in recent years thinking about so like, what's
my job. So when I wake up in the morning,
I do this thing that if you told me fifteen
years ago I was going to do this thing, I
would have, you know, coughed my beer up through my nose.
But I have this little thing I say to myself,
which is my job is to make awesome shit that
helps people do their lives better, and to work on

(14:28):
the relationships in my life, including my relationship with myself.
Those are my jobs, and to try to remind myself
as much as possible.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
That that's the goal.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
So if my latest Instagram post didn't perform, or if
my podcast numbers are dropping off, or you know, I
gave a talk and it didn't go that well, or
somebody I feel competitive with is kicking ass or whatever,
I can maybe not be so stuck in that stuff
and instead remember, like what matters. Really, the hardest part

(15:01):
of this, even harder than figuring out what matters to you,
is to remember what matters to you and so to
not get so stuck in it.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
And so you have ways to remind yourself.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
And one of the things that I've done that's rather
extreme is to get a tattoo on my wrist right
next to my watch, so that I'm looking down at
my wrist all the time and I'm seeing these letters ftboab,
which is pretty off brand for me in its earnestness,
but it stands for and this is a Buddhist phrase
for the benefit of all beings. That's my job everything

(15:33):
I do. Every time I brush my teeth, every time
I take a nap, every time I meditate, every time
I do a podcast like this.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
That.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, I have all sorts of craven motivations that are
absolutely still in there, one of them. But I as
much in my life as I've told myself a story
about how I'm like inherently rotten, even I have altruism
in me, and I want to nurture that aspect of
my inner repertoire. And so to remind myself over and
over and over again it really helps me through the

(16:04):
ups and downs of work. So is anything I'm saying
like base in actual evidence?

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Oh yeah, tons of it. I mean, first, is this
idea that you're turning to your purpose like a greater purpose, right,
And there's just been tons of work in positive psychology
about the power of having a purpose, having a life purpose,
having that kind of bigger intention, and in some ways
like it doesn't fully matter what the purpose is, it's
just that you kind of see it as having one.

(16:32):
It also seems like you build in various kinds of
rituals and practices to remember this. Because I thought you
were going to say the hardest part is sort of,
you know, kind of remembering to do it every day
right where you have to kind of do it every morning.
You've kind of put together these sort of tattoos that
allow you to remember to do it. Every time you
see it, You're like, oh, yeah, purpose. I thought it
was just my Instagram numbers, but nope, it was actually,

(16:53):
you know, for the benefit of all beings. That's why
I was doing it. So I think like the fact
that you have this purpose is really important and meaningful.
The fact that you remember to engage with it, But
the fact that yours really is an other oriented purpose,
I think gives it kind of special power and special weight.
You know, there's just lots of evidence that the typical
way we think about what makes us happy, which is

(17:14):
doing for ourselves or treating yourself or self care, it
just doesn't do the work that we think, like the
real kind of bang for your energy and your bluck
in terms of like what's going to boost your well
being is taking time to do stuff for other people.
I know on both of our podcasts we've talked a
lot about the feel good do good effect right where
it's just like, if you do stuff for others, you're
going to wind up feeling better, And so making that

(17:36):
sense of purpose not about you winds up making it
easier to kind of engage with these things because then
the parts that feel like it's about you, of like oh,
your particular podcast numbers go down, or your talk didn't
go well, it's like it's not about you. Right, if
that talk resonated with one person in the big audience,
then check, you know, you've done your work for the day,
you can kind of feel good about it. And so yeah,
So yet again the science is taking off all the

(17:59):
all the great advice you're giving us here.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
What do you think about the overlap between self interest
and altruism, because I feel like, a there's no bright
line here, They're really interwoven in some profound ways.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, I think this is a like deeply mistake in
theory we have just in general about happiness and well being,
Like there's some pot out there of like, you know,
the goodness that can happen in the world, or the
happiness that we can all achieve. And I think our
mistaken theory is often like, well, if I do something
nice for somebody else, then there's like less overall happiness
in the pot, like that happiness went to that person

(18:37):
and then there's like less for me. But that is
just like all studies show that that's just not how
happiness works. It's like a growing pie. The more nice
stuff we do for other people, they wind up feeling great.
We wind up feeling great. That gives us more, both
of us more bandwidth to do nice stuff for other people.
And I think we don't have this great growing the
pie model of happiness, but that's sort of how it works.

(18:58):
I think the key, though, is that we have to
kind of it's helpful to remember that the motivation isn't
about us. I think when we get in the headspace
of like I'm going to do nice things for other
people and I'm going to do things for the better
fit of all creatures because I personally want to be happy,
it sort of loses something. So I think really holding
on to the motivation that like it's not about you
can be a profound step for ultimately, in a very

(19:20):
ironic way, it becoming absolutely about you and your well
being and your happiness. And I think this is so
true at work, right. I mean, most of our workplaces
offer lots of opportunities to do nice stuff for other people. Right,
even if you're in the kind of worst capitalists sort
of system, maybe you're creating a product that maybe somebody
will enjoy, or at least you're making the shareholders some money,

(19:40):
like they'll be happy. Right. I think we often don't
frame kind of our success in business as being about
other people, but so often it really is. Whether that's
you know, just for the guy who works next to
you on your team and kind of making his life
and his job a little bit easier. I think that
can be really powerful because often in many jobs there
are these cases where like they're not a lot of wins,

(20:00):
or things are going bad, but you can also often
do the one nice thing for somebody next to you.
You can often make their lives a little bit easier,
and that can have profound effects on our own well being.
When everything kind of feels like it's going bad, turning
to doing one nice thing for somebody else and making
their lives a little bit easier. That can often be
a remedy that we don't often think about, but can

(20:21):
be super effective at making us feel.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
A little bit better. Yeah, that all lands for me.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
I'm thinking a little bit about an expression that I
heard from the Dalar Lama, and it goes to this
really interesting relationship between altruism and self interest. And his
expression is wise selfishness. And I like putting positive spin
on selfishness because it gets such a bad rap. But
his point is that we're all selfish, like nature designed

(20:44):
us that way. But if you want to do selfishness right,
you will be altruistic because it is what will lead
to your greatest happiness.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
And I just think that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Like there's so much pessimism abroad in the land right
now about the state of humanity, cynicism really about the
state of humanity and the state of the world, and
I don't think that's all baseless at all. And I
see the problems climate change, polarization, war, they're real, and
there's so many bugs in the human design and either

(21:19):
on the news all the time. But there's this feature
which is do good, feel good Right, That we as
social creatures feel good when we are useful to other people,
and that's a huge deal that we can harness in
our own lives and in our sense of optimism to
the extent we can get there about the species, it's.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Also just like the cure for so many other ills
that plague us. Right, Like, so many people these days
are talking about the loneliness crisis, which we experience all
the time, but especially at work. Right people are reporting
being lonelier at work than ever, and lots of research
shows that when you self report being lonely at work,
you tend to be pretty unhappy at work. But what's
an incredible remedy for loneliness Trying to reach out to

(22:01):
other people, trying to cure loneliness in somebody else. If
you take the action of doing that now, all of
a sudden, you wind up feeling less lonely doing nice
People's kind of like this cure all that we can
just sort of employ. It should be kind of your
go to move whenever you're feeling bad about anything.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Honestly, yes, service as an antidote to whatever ails us.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
Dan, you mentioned something really interesting that I'm sad to say,
plagues a lot of my work unhappiness, which is this
idea of kind of comparing yourself to other people and
the really sad thing when other people in your organization
or in you know, similar organizations that are doing related
work do really well. Sadly, my instinct often isn't to
be like, that's so great that the total happiness of

(22:41):
the world is going off. My instinct is to be like, oh,
this makes me feel really crappy about myself. And I
know this is something that you've tackled, and I know
this is something that you have a specific meditation practice
that can be really powerful for fixing over time. So
tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
I'm just laughing because it's hilarious, you know, and it's
so useful to hear you just say it out loud
that you deal with it, because I think other people
will feel like validated because it's so normal and I've
dealt with a you know, I worked in television news
for thirty years and saw so many people who were
like you know, coming up in the newsroom at the
same time as me and then just just absolutely kicked

(23:18):
my ass and are so much better compensated and better
known than.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
I ever got.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
And it, you know, I really wrestled with it, drove
me nuts, and now you know, I am like you
kind of in the wellness influencer space. I don't even
know what the right description it is for what we do,
but you know, it is very common that I'll look
at somebody who maybe I have mixed feelings about who's
kicking an ass, and I can, you know, feel badly

(23:44):
about myself or feel angry at them, or feel like
the world is unfair. And you know, over time, I've
really started to laugh at this. It really is just
an ancient program inside of me that is trying to
protect me. It's trying to help me be more effective,
but it's not the right way to be effective. So

(24:05):
I kind of laugh at it and say thank you
to it, but try not to let it own me.
And in Buddhism, there's a specific practice for dealing with this.
It's called Moudita m dta, and it's an actual meditation
practice for which I believe there's been a non trivial
amount of research. And the practice is you sit or

(24:25):
lie down, begin the practice, maybe a couple deep breaths
and then start by envisioning one person who is experiencing
success right now, and then you send them a set
of phrases like, may your happiness increase, may your health improve,
may your success expand. It's the opposite of schadenfreud. You're

(24:47):
just wishing for them to get increasingly happy. And then
you move to somebody else and do it for somebody else,
and then you move to another person and do it
for another person. And it is so counterintuitive. It is
said in the Buddhist tradition to be one of the
hardest practices because you know, I'm sure we've all seen
the T shirts. You know, every time a friend of
mine succeeds, a little part of me dies. It is

(25:09):
it's so natural to be jealous, but there's a way
to counteract that, and there's great joy in getting good
at Moodita. What you want is to become the type
of person who people love to call with good news.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
That's who you want to be. That's who I want
to be.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
I want to be the type of person who I
love like I love people I can call when something
good has happened to me.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
And that's why I want to be.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
In the latter half, of my life, and just one
last thing to say about this, and I took this.
I take this from the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg,
who's been really instrumental in promoting practices like moodita in
the West and then getting them studied in the labs.
She says, there's often a misunderstanding at the heart of jealousy,

(25:52):
which is that whatever accolade or achievement has arrived at
the doorstep of your enemy was somehow headed to you,
but they intercepted it. But it's almost never true, and
so just leaning into the reality and just laughing at
the whole system and working on developing the opposite intuition

(26:16):
can be very helpful.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
I think there's also a different misconception that I talked
to my students about too, which is that whatever you're
feeling jealous of is inherently a really genuinely good thing
with no downsides. Right. You know, the human mind sucks
in part because we're constantly comparing our insides to other
people's outsides, and that means we don't see the internal
conflict that's going on and all the time with them,

(26:40):
but particularly during moments of these so called successes you know,
last time you and I were talking about your you know,
so called career earthquake and all the stresses that you
were under when you're promoting ten percent happier. I have
to say, as another person in your field on the outside,
I didn't see any of that. If anything, I was
looking at like, oh, man, Dan's got this cool company.
It's going really well. Maybe I should have started a company.

(27:00):
Why was I sitting on it? You know, he's doing
so much better than me. Meanwhile, inside, you're not sleeping,
your hair's going gray, everything's going badly. And I think
that this is something that the research bears out, which
is that when we try to do these social comparisons,
we inevitably are doing them wrong. One of my favorite
studies that I tell my college students about brings college
students into lab and has them guess how many good

(27:22):
and bad things are happening to other people, So, how
many freshmen are going to a cool party, or getting
a really good grade, or going out on a date
with somebody they found really hot or whatever. And then
they also ask the students how many times did this
happen to you? And what you find is that the
students are constantly fantasizing that all these great things are
happening to other people, when in fact, because we ask
them how many times they're happening to them, we have

(27:43):
the actual objective data on how much this is happening,
and basically everybody simulating it wrong. We're assuming that like
maybe twenty to thirty percent more great things are happening
to people than are really happening to them. And the
same thing with the bad things. We assume no bad
things are happening to people. Nobody is getting a bad
grade or getting dissed by somebody that thought was really
hot but who didn't want to go on a date
with them, et cetera, et cetera. But that effect is

(28:05):
even bigger. We're completely getting wrong the number of bad
events that others are going through. Assume that nobody's going
through the bad stuff that we're going through. But yet
again everybody is. And so I think this is the
second misconception. It's not just that those great things that
were floating around somehow missed you. It's also that those
things that seem great on the outside might not be
so great if you were in them yourself. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yes, yeah, so it's like, would you call that a
kind of cognitive reappraisal or reframing to see that there's
there's so many mistakes in our perception of other people.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Yeah, I think so, And I think it can just
you can ask yourself the question like would this actually
be really good? Or are there things that I'm missing there?
This is something I know we talk a lot about
the Buddhist ancient traditions, but this is a spot where
the Stoics, I think got it right where they said,
you know, look at the gifts that come to other
people and look at the work that goes into those
gifts and sort of ask yourself, would you want to

(28:57):
be the one that put in that work? And that's
actually something that I come back to a lot when
I'm feeling, you know, really jealous of somebody you know,
or sort of you know, feeling this at the gym
the other day, whereas watching a colleague of mind is
started going to the gym and they got fit super fast,
and I was like, oh man, I'm feeling so jealous,
and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
How many times do they go to the gym like
they're running this ten K? I don't want to run

(29:18):
a ten k. It was like, Okay, they can have
their gift because I'm not willing to put in the
work that i would need to do to get that gift.
And I think that can be the kind of thing
that we see on the job all the time, Right,
people are kind of getting these accolades at work. But
we might want to ask ourselves a question, is that
worth my work life balance? Right? Is it worth kind
of putting in that much time and energy and kind

(29:38):
of emotional drama to kind of get the same thing
that other people are getting. And when you ask yourself
that question, sometimes the balance might suggest that accolade just
isn't really worth it, or it's not really you in
the same way that you might have expected when you
were just kind of fantasizing with the usual version of
social comparison.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
I mean just to say anecdotally on my side that
in the three years since I've left the news business,
every once in a while, maybe like every two or
three months, I'll hear that there's a job maybe coming
free or something like that in the news bi and
say I'll go back to my wife and say, should
I put my hat in the ring and she's like,
do you do you really want to do? Like, think

(30:16):
what would that? What would your life be like if?
And then I run through that exercise and I'm like, no,
I don't. I if you handed me that on silver
platter right now, I wouldn't even though it probably come
with a shitload of money. What that would do to
my life is not worth it.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
And I think doing that calculation, realizing the grass isn't
as green as we fantasize that it is, can be
super important, right, I think, especially in this day and age,
I see so much of my college students, where it
used to be the case that people work for very
long periods of time at one company and in one organization.
I think these days it's much easier to hop on
LinkedIn and just you know, jump ship whenever things aren't

(30:52):
feeling good. And that's not to say some people are
in bad situations at work. And I think we'll talk
about this moving forward, that you really probably should be
thinking about leaving and so on. But if the leaving
is just about this sort of fantasy life about this,
like you know, the grass is going to be greener
at this other place, it might not actually be worth
it right, And so I think kind of trying to
fight that cognitive bias and really do the hard work

(31:14):
of simulating more accurately what things are like, I think
that can help you not make the mistake of sort
of jumping ship when that wasn't really what was necessary.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Can I ask you about a kind of resentment that
I think might be justified?

Speaker 3 (31:25):
Please?

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Which is I believe And you probably have the evidence
closer to hand than I do, but I believe there
are just all sorts of unearned benefits that people who
look like me get in the workplace. And it seems
to me like the frustration that the folks who are
in marginalized communities might feel that seems pretty legit and

(31:49):
seems like in a different category from some of the
envy and jealousy and fomo that you and I are
talking about.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah, for sure. I mean I think these are real
structural inequities that exist out there, you know, just in
terms of things like emotional labor that people have to do,
or kind of work that's not seen, or kind of
opportunities missed out on, you know, like you know, sociological
study after sociological study pretty much shows that people from
marginalized communities experience that more. The question is kind of

(32:17):
how to deal with that, right, And I think that
there are many ways to do this. One is to
make the structural changes so that those differences don't exist
and that those inequities go away. But until those structural
changes are there, I think there's also lots of things
that individuals can do to kind of handle this stuff.
And I say that with care because sometimes when I
say that, people assume I mean we'll do that instead
of fixing the structural inequities. No, we got to fix

(32:39):
the structural inequities first. But a lot of the research
shows that finding good individual ways to cope with those
inequities wind up making it easier for you to have
the bandwidth to like fight the good fights and kind
of make you workplaces more fair and so on. But
in terms of the individual strategies, I think they get
back to some of the things that we were talking
about before, right, Like, it sucks to realize you're taking

(32:59):
on this emotional labor. It feels frustrating, it feels should
make you angry, it should make you kind of sad
that that's the state of the world. These are negative
emotions that we might want to find ways to allow
individuals to sit with and I think to give yourself
the grace to recognize that those negative emotions are there
and that they're going to necessarily affect your performance right
to give yourself the grace that you need to be

(33:21):
compassionate with yourself to kind of fight these sort of things.
We talked in the last episode a bit about some
of Kristin Neff's work on self compassion, where recently she's
just put out this new book on what she calls
Fierce Self Compassion, which is this idea that like, if
we're going to fight all those inequities you and I
were just talking about, what we might need to do
is to be kind to ourselves first. That this treating

(33:43):
ourself like a friend, which might sign kind of wimpy
or sort of not embracing, you know, the kind of real, real,
kind of inequities we face with the appropriate anger that's
normative in those situations. What Kristin Neff would say is like, no,
by treating yourself with kindness first, it can give you
the sort of fierceness that you need, that kind of
bandwidth that allows for that fierceness to sort of fight
some of these problems. And so yeah, I think those

(34:05):
things are legitimate. We need to fix some of those.
We also might need at the same time some individual
strategies to cope with the negative emotions that come from
that nasty stuff, so that we have the bandwidth to
fix it down the line.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
That's really well said and just to jump on it.
And I think a lot of people when they think
about self care, self compassion, any of it, and I
hear this sense that it's self indulgent to take care
of yourself. But it's that's really not true. Like if
you care about your colleagues and also managing work and

(34:39):
balancing that with your home life, if you care about
all of that, like it's hard to do that if
you're a mess, you know, so you need to schedule
and prioritize whatever self care it is that you know
recharges your battery. That's not self indulgent. That's mission critical.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
One of those mission critical self care practices happens outside
of worktime. It's sleep And I'll ask Dan about that
when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. One of

(35:23):
the mission critical self care things that I know you've
talked a lot about is finding ways, even in the
midst of a really stressful time at work, to make
sure you're protecting your sleep. So first, maybe we walked
through this a little bit last time, but can you
share kind of what happened to your sleep during some
of your recent career crises.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
As I mentioned in the last episode, I went through
a very painful, nearly three year long separation process from
my co founders at a meditation app that I was
part of. Used to be called ten percent Happier, and
now it's the company's called Happier. The company is still
going and it's run by very cool people, and I
recommend everybody go check it out.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
So there's no ill will there.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
But the separation process was very hard and for me
at least, and in that process I dealt with a
lot of anger and fear that led to insomnia, which
of course made all of the anger and fear worse.
I developed a few techniques that were helpful for me.
Basic sleep hygiene. I think a lot of people know.
It's helpful if the room is cold, it's helpful if

(36:24):
you're not looking at blue light through your device in
the hours leading up to going to bed. It can
be helpful if you get direct sunlight early in the day.
Exercise is very helpful in terms of tiring you out.
So there are lots of tools that I think a
lot of people are aware of.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
But can I jump in on that because this likes
me as a big at least for me personally. This
strikes me as a big case where there's cultural wisdom
but not cultural practice, right, Like, I know all those things. Yeah,
I mean, I make the room cold, and I know
I'm not supposed to look at my phone before bed,
but I'm trying to get into bed. I'm ruminating about
something that happened at work, and I'm using the scrolling

(37:01):
through whatever I'm scrolling through. Often it's Reddit, which is
probably the worst possible thing to be scrolling through. Often
I'm using that scrolling as a way to kind of
make my runative mind shut off. And of course it's
really bad because Reddit's filled with all kinds of stuff
that's going to make me even more anxious. Plus I'm
looking at this blue light. Plus I'm sort of hyping
myself up. So that's my technique. What do you actually

(37:22):
do instead when the urge to kind of look at
your digital devices sort of wins out against this sort
of cultural wisdom.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Your point is very well taken, and I screw this
up all the time too, So I don't want to
present myself as some sort of avatar of sleep hygiene perfection. However,
I think for me what's been very helpful and like
getting my shit together in this regard is tuning into
the pain of not sleeping. I mean, it's just terrible.
If I can just get in touch with how awful

(37:49):
that is, it is a very good motivator for me
to do some of the basic sleep hygiene. And more
so that the two things that were very helpful for me.
One is walking meditation. I often talk about seated meditation,
and I've described some practices where you can sit down
or lie down and do meditation. But a lot of

(38:11):
people either don't feel like they have time for this,
or if you have ADHD that you feel like you're
crawling out of your skin. And so there is this
very rich, multi millennia tradition of walking meditation, which I
will describe very briefly. And there are lots of ways
to do this, but the way I do it is
I sort of stake out a patch of land in
my house, maybe you know ten yards. You can do
this inside or outside, but you know it's nighttime and

(38:33):
often in the winter, so I'm doing it inside and
I'm just walking back and forth. It's a long trip
to nowhere. I'm walking back and forth very slowly. Now
there's a way you can do this that's really really slow,
that actually looks a little bit like paranormal activity or
something like this.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
But I don't do that. I walks a zombie moved, yes.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yes, which is a venerable ancient tradition, But I kind
of walk somewhere between that and a normal pace, slow walk.
And I'm bringing my full attention to the feeling of
my body moving, and then I'm getting distracted a million
times and starting again and again and again. And one
thing that can help you stay focused on the sensations

(39:12):
of your body moving is to use soft little mental
notes like lifting, like lifting your foot, moving, placing, thinking, planning,
just these little mental notes that and a lot of
people think, well, I shouldn't be thinking in meditation, but
thinking is inevitable. You can harness the thinking process to
get you closer to your direct sensory experience, and that's

(39:34):
what these little mental notes do, and you'll get distracted
and you start again, and you start again. The reason
why walking meditation really helps side benefit is it you know,
if you're tracking your steps, it will add to your steps.
For me is that my anxiety and anger often manifests
as an overwhelming physical restlessness. So I'm tossing and turning

(39:56):
in bed, and that's the worst thing you can do,
because if you stay in bed and toss and turn,
you're teaching the brain that the bed is a place
to struggle as opposed to to sleep. So I will
often do five, ten, fift teen minutes of walking meditation
before bed, and if I get into bed and I'm
tossing and turning, I'll get up and do more. Even
though it's totally and I keep using this word counterintuitive.

(40:18):
It's not what I actually want to do, but I
know that it works. Second piece of advice is much quicker,
and it goes back to this self talk refrain.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
It keeps coming up.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
I noticed that if I having trouble sleeping, I go
into this catastrophizing.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
Tomorrow is gonna suck.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
And oh my god, if to get up at six
and I can't sleep just I'm making these phantasma goric
movies about what's going to happen now. I'm like, no, dude,
you've been through this a million times. Even if you
get no sleep tonight, you will be fine. You have
dealt with sleeplessness before. You've always survived. It will be annoying,

(40:54):
but you're good. So get out of bed and do
your walking meditation, or get out of bed and watch TV.
That actually is one of the pieces of advice. If
you're struggling in bed, get up and do something fun,
read a book. Sometimes I'll even just like get some
work done that I was worried about I wasn't gonna
get done tomorrow. When I'm totally exhausted, I get into bed,
and honestly, it is not uncommon that I get into
bed and I start worrying I'm not going to fall asleep,

(41:17):
and I do fall asleep. Yeah, because it's the necessary
relaxation that helps me let go into this mysterious process
of sleep. So that's a long way of saying those
are two hacks.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
I love the psycho hack in particular for the reason
we were just talking about, which is like one of
the reasons we need to prioritize sleep hygiene is we
know how terribly crappy it is when we don't get sleep,
and you care about it so much, so I can
get into this terrible the same rumatative cycle where I'm like,
oh gosh, it's taking forever. You know, I'm gonna get
up and go out, but then I'm gonna have even
less time, and I'm running through my head of like

(41:48):
all these terrible scenarios that are gonna come up. But
this act of just being like, it's gonna be fine,
It's okay, you've dealt with it before, Laura, you'll deal
with it again. It's just so powerful but very counterintuitive
to just give yourself grace for this something that it
feels like you're actively screwing up, but also recognize that
your body, just like sleep, is this mysterious thing that
comes when it comes, and like you don't have any

(42:09):
control over it. That's not your fault, and so just
like letting that be the way it is can be
also a powerful strategy.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
It's like creativity or looking for an idea. It's like
the muse will visit, but you have to create the
conditions the same with this mysterious sleep thing. Just create
the conditions, and part of that is this relaxation that
can be arrived at in a counterintuitive there's that word again,
way of giving yourself permission for it just suck and
for you not to sleep. Very interestingly, as a brief digression,

(42:39):
many people deal with sleepiness during meditation, and so I
actually think giving yourself permission to fall asleep. Yeah, like
I might fall asleep and I'm not going to struggle
with it. Once there's no struggle, things can happen. Once
there are no expectations, things can unferl.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
The mind is so poorly organized sometimes it's just like
by evolutionary head. I'm just like, why does the mind
built on resistance for things like we get mad at
ourselves and that makes it worse. It just like would
be so much easier if we came with reasonable operating instructions.
I just hope the next version of the mind doesn't
have all these features.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
But the thing is, yet I agree with you all
the way. And the good news is that for millennia,
really smart people have been thinking about how to deal
with this quirky mind that natural selection has bequeathed us.
So my job and your job really is to curate
and present in compelling, sticky ways all of these techniques

(43:33):
that come out of ancient wisdom and modern science.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
And so that is actually really good news.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
Well, speaking of kind of figuring out compelling ways to
explain dumb things about the mind, one of the things
that World Mental Health Day folks pointed out is that
you know, these individual strategies, you know they're great, but
that might not be the most effective kind of intervention
for promoting happiness at work. We can empower people to
make the best of a bad situation, but if we
can make the bad situation better, that would make most

(43:59):
things better. And for this reason, employers and managers have
this big role in mental health, so says the folks
who came up with World Mental Health Day. And so
I'm curious about, well, your ideas for better training managers
at work to support mental health and in addition to
just being kind of a general good well being mindfulness guru,
I know this is something that you've thought a lot

(44:20):
about in the organizations that you've run, about how you
can be sort of the best, most compassionate boss that
you can be. And so tell me a little bit
about how you've been thinking about that and any techniques
that you've brought in to do that better.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Well, I want to hear your thoughts on the technique
as more of like a mental health authority. I'm definitely
an authority on my own experience, so I'll talk about
that in terms of having screwed this up a lot
as a manager, and I have made a lot of mistakes.
Part of this, by way of context, is that I
spent the beast bulk of my career as an anchorman

(44:54):
where I wasn't I didn't have any direct reports.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
I never had any direct reports.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
And then I co founded this company, but I was
not the CEO. I was a co founder, but somebody
else was running the company and had all the direct reports.
How I have my own company, and i have a
lot of direct reports, and I've made a lot of mistakes,
and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how
to be part of the solution rather than part of

(45:19):
the problem. In just in case anybody who works for
me is listening, I know that I am not perfect,
and I'm still making a lot of mistakes, but I
have done a lot of work on this score. One
thing I think about a lot. Is this term psychological safety,
which is yet another of these terms that can sound
kind of vague or gauzy or soft, but it really
is a ton of hard data to show that this

(45:41):
is the secret sauce. There was one big study done
internally at Google that I'm sure you're aware of, where
they were trying to figure out, like, what is the
common denominator among the best performing teams in this huge corporation,
And for a long time.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
They could not figure it out.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
And they finally arrived on this mysterious ingredient, which is
psychological safety, which is the comfort that even the most
junior person feels on any given team to speak up.
And so I have spent a lot of time and
continue to really struggle with this with somebody who has
my employees have pointed out, has a very pronounced, resting
bitch face and can be kind of scary. But really

(46:19):
thinking hard about how can I, in meetings call on
the junior people in a warm and welcoming way, make
everybody feel included. Reward people who say the hard thing
to me, Reward people who tell me when I'm screwing up.
And I try to encourage my direct reports two tell
me the truth, and then if they do, especially if

(46:40):
they do it publicly, to call them out in a
positive way and say so and so said did this
very brave thing. And they told me that I was
not expressing much gratitude to the team recently, and I
really heard that, and I'm grateful to that person, and
I'm grateful to all of you, and I'm sorry. And
here's why I wasn't doing it. And so really trying
to go hard at psychological safety is a big thing

(47:02):
that I've thought about. And another thing is working on
my communication skills, and this is very much related. I
have spent the last six years working with these two
incredible people.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
They're a married couple.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Their names are Moudita Nisker and Dan Klerman, and they
wrote a book called Let's Talk, and they developed very simple,
comprehensible and comprehensive framework for communication skills in the workplace
and otherwise. They've come on my show a bunch, and
I also just have a phone call with them every
month for six years and I've really internalized their system.
And one technique that's really been helpful in my marriage

(47:37):
and in my work life is called reflective listening. And
I'm sure you know what this is, Lord, but I'll
say it for the listeners. It's essentially, when somebody says
something to you, you listen very carefully. Instead of planning
what you're going to say next, you listen very carefully
and then repeat back to them in your own words,
very briefly, the bones of their message to you.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
And this does two things. One, it gives people.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
It gives your interlocutor what every human being wants desperately,
although they may not know it, which is to be
seen and heard. And the second thing is it's a
circuit breaker on your own reflexive reactive response. You can't
pop off because you have this assignment of reflecting. And
so I have found that when I can do this

(48:21):
with my colleagues, especially the junior colleagues, it really helps
people relax, feel seen and valued, even if I deeply disagree.
Once I reflect them into submission, and I say that
with tongues slightly and cheap, I can then say the
hard things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to hear. Okay,
so I just threw a lot at you. How does
all of that go down with you?

Speaker 1 (48:42):
No? No, I think it's really powerful. I think, you know,
reflective listening is so powerful in part because not only
does it make you not pop off, it like stops
that circuit breaker, but it can stop a kind of
different circuit, which is kind of misunderstanding circuit, because sometimes
someone tells us something, we hear something completely different, and
we're reacting and popping off not to what they meant,
but what we heard. And so I've heard a kind

(49:04):
of addition to this technique, which is an addition to
kind of having use serve some in your own words,
as succinctly as possible, what they just said. You sometimes
follow that with did I get that right? Or did
I miss anything? And that allows this sort of cyclical activity,
which is like making sure we kind of understand each other,
because sometimes with a junior colleague, if you do that's
like oh, did I get that right? Or am I

(49:25):
missing anything, they'll be like, well, yeah, you're actually missing
this other part, which is and the second thing winds
up being even more relevant, or it really changes your view.
It's a reason you didn't think about before, and so on,
and so yeah, so I think this iterative process of
making sure you come to true understanding and true listening
can be so powerful, and just having like a kind
of a really quick hack to do that is important

(49:48):
because especially in busy situations, especially in sometimes high emotion
situations or kind of high fear of failure situations, like
the kind of thing we find at work, I think
having one of these kind of quick go to hacks
of like, oh no, no, my assignment right now is
to do the reflective listening thing. Let me make sure
I did it right. It can just be the kind
of go to that I think eases everybody's minds.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
You can change.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
I mean, think about it like we're all our own cosmos.
As Walt Whitman said, right, we have this incredibly rich
and complex inner life that we're not even fully aware
of that's influenced by all our ancestors and by the culture,
and by what happened this morning and our conversations with
our spouse. Is so much going on an individual mind

(50:31):
in a workplace, and then you are trying to communicate
from your cosmos through this unbridgable divide of somebody else's
cranium and cosmos, and to just honor how difficult this
is and use tools that up the odds of success.
I think it is a such a winning recipe, especially

(50:52):
for people of power in organizations, because the way I
think about it, and I've really tried to train myself
that if there's a problem on my team, it's gonna
come from me. Ultimately, the fish is always going to
rot from the head, and so I've really tried to
develop the reflex of taking the full responsibility for whatever's

(51:16):
going wrong on the team, hopefully not to take it
too far because sometimes things won't be my fault, but
generally speaking, given how power works, that it is mostly
going to be coming from me. Just a great little
phrase to throw at you and for your listeners, especially
listeners with power to contemplate. This comes from a great
executive coach named Jerry Klonna, with whom I've also worked

(51:39):
intensely for the last six years. This is a question
to ask yourself once in a while. How am I
complicit in the conditions I say I don't want? And
as a manager, it's such an inconvenient question to ask yourself,
but it really helps.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
That's huge, And I think that's huge in part because
when you're with the psychological research shows is that when
you're in positions of power, you sometimes can't see that complicitness,
Like there's a sense in which privilege blinds you to
all this kind of stuff. There's a really great book
by the social psychologist Vanessa Bond called You Have More
Influence Than You Think, and she just talks about how

(52:12):
we're just blind to the fact that our you know,
mild suggestions come off as like incredibly strong demands that
people are into years about in the bathroom because we don't,
as a manager, maybe realize that we've said anything that
had that hold over people. And so I think that
that question of really doing the reflection of could I
see this from somebody else's perspective? Could I ask the

(52:33):
question of, even if I don't realize it, what am
I doing that might be contributing to the situation. It
gives you a little bit of a like lens into
that influence that you might be having, a lens into
that complicitness that if you didn't take the time to
do that reflection, you otherwise wouldn't have.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, Vanessa's great, and I had her on my show
and she had to be a little cute a lot
of influence on me through her work. But just to
throw this back at you, like when the people behind
World Mental Health Day talk about how, especially in a workplace,
it's great to give people individual coping mechanisms, but we
do want to take a look at what the structure is.

(53:08):
Like you, oh, with it being so steeved in the research,
what do you think the answers are there?

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Well? I think part of it is like this sort
of managerial training to become better listeners, become better communicators.
I think what you mentioned about psychological safety is huge.
I often hear this framed both in terms of psychological safety,
but also in terms of finding ways to create belonging
at work, which just allows a sense of safety, a
sense of trust more broadly, and so some of their

(53:35):
recommendations are kind of about that of like what can
you do to sort of focus on thriving and belonging
at work? And I think a big one beyond just
sort of communicating, is just finding ways to allow people
to kind of connect on the job in ways that
we don't expect. One of my favorite studies looking at
the power of belonging comes out of Yon Emmanuel Denv's
work at Oxford University. He did this big study where

(53:57):
he partnered up with indeed and got job data on
fifteen million workers at over five thousand different companies to
look at what promoted happiness at work, and what he
found overall was that it was people's salary. It wasn't
having a good manager, it wasn't work life balance. Those
things mattered, but the biggest thing that mattered the most
is your sense of belonging at work, which was defined

(54:18):
in sort of two ways. One is your sense of
kind of meaning at work, like what I do matters
to somebody, which ultimately is a question of like social
connection and kind of mattering. But another one, which I
didn't expect, was the answer to the question do you
have a best friend at work? If you said yes
to that, you're much more likely to say that you're
happy at work. And I think this gets us to
it to just a thing that we forget is important

(54:40):
for thriving at work, which is the kind of connection
that we bring to our jobs. You and I and
our podcast have both talked about the importance of social connection,
but we forget that like we're spending like half of
our waking lives a third of our actual lives, if
not more, at work, And so if we're not finding
ways to build those big connections at work, then we're
probably missing out on a lot of the possible, like

(55:01):
opportunities for social connection that oftentimes people aren't getting elsewhere.
And so I think kind of giving workers the opportunities
to connect is something that managers could do better, but
also something that would help everyone thrive because a lot
of jan Emanuel Denv's work suggests that like when you
can allow for social connection at work as a manager,
you wind up improving everybody's performance and actually ultimately making

(55:23):
a company more money. He actually has data from this
Indeed survey that connects having a best friend at work
to the stock performance of different companies. So companies that
allow for more best friendships at work make the most money.
And so I think this is another situation where it's
kind of counterintuitive. You wouldn't think that that mattered so
much for a performance, but ultimately it's the kind of
thing that you do that improves performance but also makes

(55:45):
everybody feel better when they're on the job too.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
That's so compelling.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
But so what do I For example, my company, I
have about ten people between working on the podcast and
working on my sub stack, and there's about ten people
all told, everybody's remote, how would I foster an environment
where somebody could even come close to making a best
friend in that environment?

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Yeah, One thing that folks suggest is to try to
turn the virtual world into as much like the office
situation like in real life as possible. And one of
the things that I think we do badly in virtual
situations is like we lose out on what would the
normal social connection that would happen in a meeting type situation. Right, So,
if you're in a physical office and you show up

(56:29):
for a meeting and everybody sits around at the desks,
nobody is just like silently staring forward like you might
do on a Teams meeting or at a Zoom meeting.
You're kind of chit chatting like oh that's a nice shirt,
Like oh, how is your weekend, and blah blah blah.
I think we do that a little bit less in
virtual environments because it's kind of just a sort of
strange environment. I think it's not as psychologically rich to
have these kind of connections or the things you'd naturally

(56:51):
talk about. But a lot of workplace psychologists who focus
on social connection recommend start your meeting with ten minutes
of that, it might feel like you're losing out on
time and you're missing out in these important opportunities to
do the work of the day. But the data on
best friends at work suggest that if you make those
social connections, you'll wind up kind of the performance benefits
that come with it. A second thing that promotes mattering

(57:13):
is to really just kind of call out those moments
where somebody does something great or somebody does something that
you really appreciate. And this is especially true for the boss.
So you talked about kind of being grateful when people,
you know, make the hard point or say something that's
really vulnerable. I think expressing that really openly and especially
point about gratitude is doing that in a way with

(57:34):
reasons of why you appreciated it so much can be
really powerful. So, you know, I just want to say
that I really appreciated when you brought that up. It
made me think a little bit differently because the X, Y,
and Z reasons and now it's actually going to cause
me to do something different, and so thank you so
much for bringing that up. That is just a subtle
way of teaching people that what they did matters. If
their performance did something it mattered to somebody else at

(57:55):
the company. Another way to show mattering is just to
kind of take into account people's day to days and
ways that you might not expect. I was at a
kind of corporate talk recently where I ran into a
CEO who said that she US is a strategy. It
is a really much bigger organization than yours. It wasn't
ten people, it was like two hundred people of writing
down everybody's birthday and spending the first ten minutes of

(58:17):
the day wishing whoever's birthday. It was a happy birthday
via email. And in addition to just say like happy birthday,
one thing about what they've done. You know, I just
want to say, hey, happy birthday. You know I noticed
that you did well on the Q two orport. You know,
it's great that you guys are put in so much work.
Thanks so much. And what she said was that, yeah,
it's ten minutes of the day that she could have started,
you know, diving to the normal work stuff. But she'd

(58:39):
get back at email from each of those people that
got that birthday email that said, oh my god, you
made my day, thanks so much. Rights person's shock that
the CEO of this big company knows her birthday and
is saying something nice. Those are the simple kind of
psychological techniques that make people feel like it mattered that
I showed up at work today, Like my behaviors on
the job are making a difference for somebody, maybe not

(59:01):
like making a profit, but like people are paying attention.
And I think those kind of expressions can seem silly
or they seem like they don't really matter. They're superfluous,
and they take away from the real work that we
have to do on the job, but psychologically that they're
really important. They contribute to mattering, and they made people
kind of feel like the work they do is kind
of critical, that there's psyched to show up to work.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
I'm humbled as I listened to all this because I'm
realizing that even my ten person team, that I can
fall short quite severely on this, and so it's really
helpful for me personally to listen to everything you've said
and just I'm just remembering a story, very brief story
of when my son was born almost ten years ago,

(59:42):
and Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, sent me an
email and I was like a CEA level anchorman at
a very small part of Disney, you know, at ABC News,
which is a tiny, tiny part of what Disney does.
He sent me an email and I replied, and he replied,
and I replied. We he actually took, you know, a

(01:00:04):
non trivial amount of his time as the CEO of
one of the biggest corporations on earth to really correspond
with me about the birth of my child. And then
I extrapolate from that to how often I failed to
do that on my tiny team. And it's really a
good learning for me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
Yeah, I think it's tricky, right, because those managers you're
often you know, you're stressed out, you're time famished, you're like,
you know, kind of running around doing all this stuff
that feels like it has to get done. And I
think we just need to frame the social connection mattering
parts of stuff that has to get done too. And
the kicker though, is that, ultimately, you know, that felt
great for you that Bob sent you this email. I

(01:00:40):
bet his day was made better, Right. There are these
kind of win wins that we're missing out on on
the job because we're not focused on this stuff. But
ultimately we get kind of a kickback of that happiness
boost as a manager by kind of doing more of
this kind stuff and the sort of inclusive stuff for
our employees too.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Make you a very convincing case. Lori Scanos well.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
Dan, thank you so much. I'm so grateful that you
took the time to chat with me. I learned something
new every single time I talked to you, and I
did this time as well, and so just huge gratitude,
so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Likewise, I send that gratitude right back at you, and
I learn a ton of listening to you, especially in
these last five to seven minutes.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
So thank you.