September 23, 2025 • 50 mins
Uncertainty can feel exhausting, even paralyzing. Yet within our hardest questions lies the potential for clarity, resilience, and meaning. In this conversation, Elizabeth Weingarten guides us through four categories of questions that shift how we see ourselves and the world. Instead of chasing quick answers, we can learn to embrace questions as catalysts for growth, connection, and purpose.
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Working on Purpose is broadcast live Tuesdays at 6PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Working on Purpose is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Working on Purpose Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
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(00:20):
choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome back to the Working in a Purpose program, which
has been brought to you with passionateurprice since February of
twenty fifteen NICs for Tornadian this week. Great to have you.
I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortez. If we've not met
before and you don't know me, I'm a workforce advisor,
organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author. My
team and I at Gusto Now help companies enliven and
fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture,
(01:28):
inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose.
Many organizations are not aware of how critical it is
to invest in developing their leaders and managers not just
for their own effectiveness, but also to avoid burnout and
keep them fulfilled. And also that they can also measure
and monitor the purpose experience in their organization to keep
it working as an operational imperative. And did you know
(01:49):
that inspired employees in purpose led companies outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration and purpose are good for the
bottom line. You can learn more about us now. We
can work together at gusto dashnow dot com or my
personal site at least Coortes dot com. Getting in today's program.
We have with us today Elizabeth Weingarden. She is a
(02:09):
journalist and applied behaviors to works at the intersection of
Sytown through new book Following on Questions, A New way
to thrive in today's in Times of Uncertainty, which we'll
be talking about today. She joins us from San Francisco.
Elizabeth A hearty welcome to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited
to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
You're so welcome. I'm so glad that you were findable
on LinkedIn. When I reached out to you as we
were talking before we got on air, you and I
were engaging over a post about Jeff Wetsler, who had
had in my program earlier talking about his book relative
to seeking inquiry and feedback from others. And when I
saw your profile and the book that you've written, I
was like, you gotta come.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
On, and you said yes, you know. I love that
we were able to connect on LinkedIn, and I also
love that there's this growing community of people who are
so passionate about questions and curiosity as tool to help
us all leave more meaningful lives and filled with purpose.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I agree and let's just show our viewers who are
tuning in, look at this beautiful thing you put into
the world. Isn't it gorgeous?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Thank you? I appreciate that we went back and forth
on the cover quite a bit, but I like where
we ended up.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I understand the cover is is one of the hardest choices.
Forget the whole book, just it's the cover totally. And
by the way, let me just say something. You know
obvious here your subtitle is about uncertainty.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
What uncertainty are you're talking about?
Speaker 3 (03:31):
We could possibly be talking about today's times.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Oh, we live in the most predictable certain worlds. Ever,
I don't think anybody no, it's so funny. I didn't
when I started writing this book. I could never have
anticipated how much uncertainty would grow to the extent that
it has been and was when this book came out
on this past spring. But you know, I very much
(03:57):
wanted this book to be a a guide for people
who are finding themselves feeling stuck in uncertainty. And we
can talk about that a little bit more. But the
definition that I begin the book with is like, what
is uncertainty? Right? We talk about uncertainty all the time,
but uncertainty, as I bring in this definition from a
(04:18):
couple of psychologists, is a sense of doubt that stops
or delays progress in action. So it's really that feeling
of I don't have the answers, I don't know what's
going on, and I feel like I can't move forward.
And so the question is how do we actually move
forward when we don't have all the answers in our lives?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah? Yeah, I thought it was really beautiful how you
talked about that, and I want to get to more
of Well, let me just situate a couple things that
One thing in particular that I got out of that
particular aspect of it is that you said that research
suggests that we tend to exploit options that are familiar
to us rather than exploring new choices, even though the
best choice is generally to alternate between exploiting what's familiar
(04:58):
and exploring what's new. I think that's really that's key
that you are situating throughout your book, this notion that
we tend to harken back to what's familiar or already
known about us. I think that's a really important thing
that we need to fire it out for this conversation.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Yeah, I think that's right, and I think that in
times of uncertainty, there's this tendency to be afraid of
the unknown. Right. And we can talk about this a
little bit more, but we're wired as humans to want
to avoid uncertainty and seek certainty, seek the known at
any cost, and part of that is how we evolve
(05:33):
evolutionarily speaking. It takes more, it takes more energy for
us to deal with uncertainty, and when food was scarce,
we were evolving to try to make do with less
energy intensive activities, less food, right. So we're really trying
still in our modern age, to try to avoid any
(05:53):
activities that make us spend more energy than we need to.
So we're trying to seek what's known and seek what's certain.
But when we do that, we end up cutting ourselves
off from possibilities, from different kind of ways of being
in the world. That could end up, you know, leading
us to really kind of exciting futures. But it's understandable
(06:14):
we kind of have this, We have this desire to
cling to the known and too the certain, and we
end up making a lot of fear based decisions based
on that versus decisions based on curiosity and that desire
to explore.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yes, for sure. One of the things I always find
fascinating is where these ideas come from. You know, over
the ten and a half years I've been hosting this podcast,
I've talked to so many authors in that time, right,
And so a book comes from somewhere, And of course
I read your book, so I know where yours came from.
But our listeners and viewers who haven't yet maybe pick
it up, don't. So let's in this early part of
(06:49):
our conversation talk about how this book came to be
and what you were going through to try to learn
and grapple with what you were dealing with at the time.
That help you get acquainted with this notion of relation
too uncertainty the way that you do now.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, So this book really emerged during a time
in my life when I was buckling under really heavy questions.
And this was actually during the pandemic, and so a
very I'm sure nobody else was dealing with uncertainty at
that life, right the the time when everybody was probably
asking some big questions. For me, the questions were about
(07:25):
my marriage and about my career. And so I'll give
you all a little bit of context. I had been
in a relationship for several years at that point, but
we had recently gotten married kind of we were a
few months in to the marriage. I had long kind
of felt this kind of pushing pull in my relationship.
(07:45):
I felt pulled to my husband because there were so
many ways that he challenged me that the relationship was
kind of helping me become a better person. I loved him,
you know, passionately, and at the same time, we were
very different people, and so there was a lot of
friction in the relationship too. And so I had always
(08:08):
kind of felt equal parts love and doubt and this
question of is this the right person for me should
be together? And I was asking this question a few
months after we got married, and it was getting louder
because of some factors that I talk a little bit
about in the book. So I'm holding onto this question of,
(08:29):
you know, should we get a divorce? And for anybody
that's ever had that question, it's a very scary, heavy
question to be dealing with. It can feel very lonely,
it can feel very isolating. So that's question number one.
Question number two. I had also recently left a job
to pursue a creative project that was really meaningful to me,
(08:49):
and I was at this point I had been working
on it for many months, and I had just been
told by somebody who I was working with on this
project that the direction that I had sunk all of
this time and energy into was not working. And so
I met this crossroads in my relationship. I met this
(09:10):
crossroads in my career where all of a sudden, this
thing that I thought was going to be my next
big break, my next big project, that's not working out,
and so I'm wondering what am I doing with my life?
And I at that point was feeling kind of rather
desperate to find some answers to these questions. And the
(09:32):
advice that I kept finding again and again in self
help and pop psychology books was just to kind of quote,
embrace uncertainty. And I'm sure if you've heard that advice before,
but perhaps that will sound familiar. It's everywhere, and to me,
when I read things telling me to embrace uncertainty, it
felt so unhelpful because I think sometimes in life, sure
(09:56):
we want to embrace uncertainty. Right, Maybe your family is
planning a surprise for your birthday. Great that's fun uncertainty.
I'm happy to embrace that. But for me, the uncertainty
in my life felt so painful and so scary that
it wasn't something that I wanted to embrace, and it
almost felt like this form of kind of toxic positivity. So,
(10:16):
you know, it was around that time that, luckily, I
discovered a much older book that for me contained what
was much better, if not more challenging advice. And that
book was Letters to a Young Poet. And for those
who aren't familiar with this book, it's a book of
correspondence between the Austrian poet Rainier and Maria Wilka and
(10:36):
a nineteen year old aspiring poet by the name of
Franz Cappus. And it's from the early twentieth century. And
it's a book that counts people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Hoffman,
Marilyn Monroe among its fans. And I learned in writing
this book actually that Lady Gagat even has a line
from it tattooed on her, so it has has quite
an interesting kind of modern history too. So the whole
(11:00):
book is beautiful, but I was really struck by one
part of it, in particular, and that's part where Cappus
is asking Rilka for all kinds of advice, not only
about how to become a poet, but also how to
live his life. And you know, of course, if you
know a nineteen year old, you know that they're full
of questions, right, But at the end of the day,
Franz Cappus could be any of us. We're all asking
(11:22):
questions at any point in our life. But what makes
this book so remarkable is that Rilka famously responds not
with an answer to Cappus per se, but by telling
him how important it is to quote love the questions
themselves if they were locked rooms or books written in
a foreign language. And he advises Cappus to not search
(11:44):
for the answers now and talks about the importance of
living the questions. But of course Rilka never explained what
he meant by living the questions now or how to
think about loving the questions, And he also wasn't thinking
about really how to do this in a time of
AI and Google and smartphones and social media influencers. So
(12:05):
the book is really an exploration of, you know, how
do we fall in love with the questions of our lives,
particularly the ones that can be really painful, and especially
in a culture in which so many of us have
become addicted to fast, easy answers.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
M okay. So I get delighted when my authors that
come on my podcast do something like you did in
your book. Or you've taken what you've did that that
that piece of work, and you've now and you threw it,
strown it through your whole entire books, so that every
chapter really starts with a snippet from some of that correspondence.
It's delicious, Elizabeth, It's just delicious. So I really like
(12:42):
how you brought us in and then how you used
that text to teach from, to illuminate with and some
of the pros is just delightful. So I just want
to say that while we while we talked about while
we're on this subject, you did mention that the bit
about smartphones, and I was really captivated with what you
wrote in the book that you reference someone in Carlton
(13:04):
who I think might be a researcher and how they
became very curious about the widespread smartphone use and how
it might be influencing our collective capacity to tolerate uncertainty.
And he doesn't draw a direct correlation. But it's quite
an interesting idea if in fact, you know this idea
that we can always look at our phone really quickly
look anything up that would it would certainly it wouldn't
(13:27):
be surprising to me that that would actually contribute to
our inability or our unwillingness to want to embrace uncertainty,
can you say a bit more?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Absolutely so, if we think about our tolerance for uncertainty
as a muscle, right, you can think about, you know,
if you're if you're going to the gym once a
month or once a year, you're not going to think
of yourself as somebody that is, you know, really strengthening
your muscles and really fit, versus if you're somebody that
is maybe doing some kind of strength, strength training or
(13:59):
exercise is multiple times a week. And so the same
goes with really figuring out how to increase that tolerance
for uncertainty. Tolerance for uncertainty, as I mentioned earlier, is
not something that comes naturally to us as humans. It's difficult,
and so the idea is how do we build up
that strength and that tolerance. And so the point that
(14:19):
Carlton Nicholas Carlton, who is a psychology professor at the
University of Regina and Canada. His research is really interesting
because it suggests that we're losing all of these opportunities
to strengthen that uncertainty tolerance muscle every time we do
little things during the day. So, for instance, you're about
(14:42):
to go to a new restaurant. If you're like me,
you immediately google the menu, right, And there's nothing inherently
wrong with that. It's fun to check it out. But
the point is that there are lots of little opportunities
to kind of sit with the discomfort of on certainty
and kind of be with whatever emotions you're feeling in
(15:04):
that moment. And so whether it's you know what, I'm
just going to wait and see what the menu is
when I get there, or I'm traveling to a new city,
I'm not going to map out everything I'm doing every day.
I'm going to wander around and see what I find.
And maybe it's not. Maybe every day isn't this kind
(15:25):
of optimized version of travel, But that's okay, that's kind
of I'm leaning into that uncertainty and the unpredictability of life.
So I think his point, you know, is, I've found
it really interesting and kind of trying to think about
how do I build some of those moments into my
(15:45):
day to day life so that when I'm dealing with
these bigger life uncertainties, I have a foundation from which
to kind of draw more strength to deal with some
of that kind of bigger picture uncertainty.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
I love that. Let's build our uncertainty muscles. Shall we
on that note? Let's grab our first break. I'm your host,
Doctor e Release Cortes. We're in the air with Elizabeth Weiningarden,
who is a journalist and applied behavioral scientists who works
at the intersection of science and storytelling. We've been talking
about where this book came from, why is navigating uncertainty
so powerful and opportunistic for us? After the break, we're
(16:20):
going to do a quick dive into what does a
life of loving questions look like and talk about the
four ways that Elizabeth encourages us to embrace questions for
different kinds of questions. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose
and inspired leadership and meaning infuse cultures that elevate fulfillment,
performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or
to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please
(17:10):
visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how
to get your employees working on purpose. This is working
on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program
today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an
email to a lease a Lise at eliscortes dot com.
(17:33):
Now back to working on purpose.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Thanks foresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am dedicated
to helping create a world where organizations thrive because their
people thrive are led by inspirational leaders that help them
find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that
betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books.
So one of my latest came out is called The
Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically enliven
(18:01):
your business. And I wanted to help leaders understand today's
discerning and diverse workforce. What do they want to need
to give their best and want to stay, and then
I give you twenty two best practices to equip you
to provide that and do your culture so they will.
You can find my books on Amazon or my website
at least quortest dot com if you are just joining us.
My guest is Elizabeth Weingarten, the author of How To
(18:22):
Fall in Love With Questions, A New Way to Thrive
in Times of Uncertainty. So before we dive back into
what we were talking about, I want to share with
you briefly because I think you'll appreciate that given what
you share. Just before went on break, I had a
gentleman on named David Pearl on my podcast some time ago,
and he runs an organization called Street Wisdom, and essentially
(18:43):
that he's in the UK, but they do these things
all over the world. They do walk shops or people
literally might have a question on their mind and then
they're sort of ushered into this mental space of being
able to enjoy and fall into the moment. And then
they are released into the city and they do a
kind of a you know, they walk through a city
and they might just notice what the city is telling
(19:04):
them is. They walk through and sometimes they get some
new insights or a new way of looking at things,
et cetera. It's really quite delightful. So I just wanted
to share that because I thought you might really jam
on that idea.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
I love that. I mean, I think and we can
get to this in a little bit. But one of
the reasons I love kind of this practice of developing
a greater awareness of the question that you're asking in
your life, and I talk in the book about developing
a question's practice is because I think questions can act
as really powerful filters for the world. Right when you
(19:37):
become aware of a question that you're asking, to your
point at least, it really helps to filter in what
are some of the possible kind of answers and insights
that you may not have been aware of without kind
of bringing that awareness first to the big question that
you're asking.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And on that note, now it's a good time for
us to talk about those four different kinds of questions
or ways you help us relate to questions Like parts
of fruit tree. That's just so creative. So let's talk
about the four different kinds of questions. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Absolutely so. When I first started writing the book and
I would talk to people about it, they'd be like, okay,
so what type of questions are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Right? Like?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Are we talking about what's for dinner? You know, how
can I be happy? So, of course there are lots
of different types of questions in the world, and when
we talk about developing a different relationship to our questions
so that we can then have a different relationship to uncertainty,
it helps to really know what type of question are
we asking. And when I go through this framework, I
(20:38):
think keep in mind if you're somebody that's asking a
question right now, knowing what type of question you're asking
can help you understand your expectations for that question. And
what I mean by that is how much should you
be waiting around for an answer to that question? Is
it time to let that question go? So let me
kind of start with the first part of this four
(20:59):
part fruit tree. So the first type of question is
a peach question, and like a peach these are the
types of questions that ripen rather quickly into an answer. Right,
So it's a question like will I get the job,
You're going to know pretty quickly the answer to that question.
So that's your peach style question. The second style question
is a paw paw style question, and so powpaw frute
(21:21):
I learned while reporting this book it takes the pawpaw
tree sometimes five to seven years to actually grow the
poppaf fruit. So these are questions that are a little
bit longer term, but they are questions that you're still
ultimately going to get the answer to. So maybe it's
a question like, you know, am I going to find
fulfillment and satisfaction in this career change that I'm making.
(21:45):
So the third type of question is the heartwood question.
And heartwood is the part of the tree that actually
stays with the tree for its entire life. It's the
core of the tree. The bark grows around the heartwood
in circles. And so you can think about your heartwood
questions as the questions that they stay with you over
the course of your life. They evolve as you evolve.
(22:08):
And so these are the questions like who am I?
Who am I becoming? How do I live a life
of meaning in purpose? These are the questions that aren't
ever answerable in a permanent way. Right, maybe you have
an answer at one time in your life, but at
a different time you reopen the question and you explore
it anew The fourth type of question is a deadly
(22:30):
and this is the type of question that maybe at
one point it served a purpose, it no longer serves
a purpose in your life. It is a question to
let go of. And these are the questions in our
lives that are really kind of keeping us stuck in
patterns of rumination and regret. Questions about you know, why
didn't I break up with this person? What if I
(22:52):
had just taken that other career path, the kind of
what if should have all of that language that is,
you know, fundamentally not moving you forward into a new place.
It's keeping you stuck in the past, in a place
where you're not growing. So those are you know, that's
kind of the gist of the types of questions. And
(23:13):
I think as you kind of move into a question's
practice and kind of becoming a little bit more aware
of your questions, it can really help to have that
deeper understanding of kind of what type of question am
I asking and what can I expect from that question?
Speaker 3 (23:27):
I think it's very powerful and just having even just
that ability to segment questions like that, and then also
to your point, recognizing, I know from me I've gone
through periods in my life when I spend way too
much time in the dead leaves variety, way too much time.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Right, I think you're similar to so many people, right,
I think there are often so many kind of dead
leaves wrestling around, you know, in there. But I'm curious
to hear you know, do you have a like a
paw paw or a heartwood question that's been on your
mind in this moment?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Well, I would say the heartwood question for me is
always unfolding. So I am a person who has I
have stepped on to the path of purpose, right, I
mean this has been a chosen, intentional path, and it
hasn't necessarily been an easy path. It's not necessarily convenient
to live your purpose per se. You have to be
obedient to it if you're going to really answer it,
(24:21):
and there's a lot of other ways to live life.
I would say, in an easier fashion, what then to
really pursue and give yourself over to purpose? So I
would say that I do question, you know, how is
this going to unfold? For me? It has continued to unfold.
And I never would have imagined, Elizabeth some ten years
(24:41):
ago that I would have five books out and that
we would have stood up the Gusto Now Academy, which
has nine different learning communities to it. I never would
have imagined we would have done that. And yet I
know there is so much more beyond this, but I
don't know what it is. And I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with the uncertainty. But it's a sort of
like giving myself a over to that open space that
(25:02):
is part of my dance with life when I'm learning
as well.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
You know, it reminds me. One of the stories that
I tell in the book is about the educator and
activist Parker Palmer, who who very much. He's written many
best selling beautiful books, one called Let Your Life Speak,
and it's you know, at the at the core, so
much of what he writes and talks about is, you know,
(25:29):
staying true to what you know. He describes in his
work the things that you can't not do yes, yes, yes, yes,
And and I think I hear that and what you're
saying just kind of you know, acknowledging, Hey, there's this
other path over here that would probably be a lot
easier for me, but then there's this other work and
I can't not do it. And he jokes he knows
(25:50):
it's a double negative, but it's the truest way for
him to say it, right, I say, I use that
exact phrase all the time.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
What can you not not do? Yeah? You know, And
so that's really powerful. So thank you for letting me,
for indulging me into this, because this is a big
reason why I keep doing this podcast, Elizabeth, is because
it is a catalyzing agent for me, because I read
my guest books cover to cover every week, and then
we write a newsletter article next and the following week
about it. To apply the concepts. I mean, this stuff
(26:17):
works in me.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
I seek it.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You know this is this is not something that you know.
I don't audit this experience. So thank you for letting me. Also,
you know, swim in the questions too. And speaking of
Parker Palmer, and I do have a couple of his books.
You do reference him and Rockwell and Jamati. But I
want to situate for our listeners and viewers, what does
a life of loving questions look like or what might
(26:42):
it look like for people give us give them a
bit of a promise or what that what that could be?
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Yeah? Absolutely, so I should say the whole kind of
second part of the book is really devoted to exploring,
through both science and story, what this can look like.
It was really important to me to not just kind
of provide here's the five steps to doing this right,
but to really look at the lives of real people
(27:10):
who have really tried to organize their kind of thinking
and their actions and behavior around this idea of loving
the questions. And I think you know one way to
think about this. And something that I observed and really
almost everybody that I talked to, is that a life
(27:31):
spent kind of loving and living your questions is a
life when you are kind of continuously being led back
to yourself and your relationship with yourself. And something that
I found in the book is that a relationship, our
relationship to uncertainty is actually really just a reflection of
our relationship to ourselves. And so people who are kind
(27:52):
of spending their lives really kind of focused on this
deeper exploration of questions, bringing deeper awareness to the question
in their lives. And again, I we can talk about
this maybe later. I have a whole kind of approach.
What I talk about is a questions practice, kind of
a guided way of getting into that yourself. But what
(28:13):
you find from people that are that are kind of
using questions, they're using them as kind of an internal
GPS or an internal compass, kind of leading them back
to what do I really want? Who do I really
want to be? And and you can see this in
Parker Palmer's story. He was somebody who grew up kind
(28:35):
of as the Golden Boy, as he describes it. He
you know, he people kind of had a lot of
expectations for him, who he should be, what success looked
like for him. And as he kind of went further
and further in his academics in his career, he started
to feel like those expectations we were sitting heavy on
(28:56):
his shoulders and that they just weren't right for him.
That he was feeling called to go on a very
different path, a path that he kind of often describes
as going into the into the woods and ended up,
you know, instead of going down this path of being
an academic at a prestigious academic institution, he ends up first, uh,
(29:19):
you know, becoming uh uh, taking some time at a
at a Quaker organization kind of learning all of the
uh kind of traditions of this like Quaker community, spending
many years there in this kind of educational community and
ultimately becoming a writer and educator and activist who has
(29:41):
moved and inspired you know, millions of people around the world.
And uh, but he writes about how and he talked
to me about how difficult this was at many stages
of his life, but that ultimately it was these big
questions that were foundational to him continuously finding hi way
back to himself what he wanted apart from the shoulds right,
(30:04):
who we should be on what we should want to do.
But and this relates to I think a really key
part of having a questions practice, which is asking yourself.
You know, am I asking the right questions in my life?
And we can perhaps talk about that a little bit more,
but I'd say that's really one of the central parts
of living a life of of and being inspired by
(30:29):
your questions.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
And one more thing to situate that into my world
because really, so much of what I've cared about in
my practice as an organizational psychologist and working in organizations
with leadership and development is it is growing people into
their higher potential. And so one of the things that
we've sort of been talking about through this conversation already.
But I want to hit this specifically. You have a
(30:53):
couple of lines in your book that if you could
speak to them that I think are just really, really alluring.
It can help our listeners and viewers maybe change their
relationship to how they're viewing uncertainty, and the lines are
as an uncertainty. As uncertainty amplifies who we are, it
can also reveal parts of us that before before we've
been able to ignore or suppress or deny. At least
(31:15):
for me, that's you. A big part of what's uncomfortable
about living with uncertainty results from resisting this revolution and
clinging to an old identity or way of being. I
think that's really powerful. And when we help our listeners
and viewers recognize that, when we don't allow ourselves to
relate to uncertainty in a more open fashion, that we
(31:36):
are resisting our own growth, and I think that's really powerful.
Speaker 4 (31:39):
That's exactly right. You hit it on the head. The
fundamentally loving your questions is about embracing your own growth
and embracing the fact that it can be really hard
and scary. The paths of growth, can you know, is
not an easy one, but ultimately it can be one
of the most fulfilling and rewarding ones. And I think
(32:01):
about this when I think also about kind of going
back to Rilka, this poet you know, who inspired the
book largely. Rilka has a very nuanced take on love,
and he writes about love as the most difficult task
that we undertake in our lives and yet the most
rewarding one. Right, So it's far from this kind of
(32:22):
toxic positivity of embrace uncertainty, loving the questions really acknowledges that,
you know, when we're in relationship with these questions of
our lives, some days we're going to love that experience
and want to give it a hug, and other days
we're going to, you know, really feel frustrated and fed
up with it, just the way you would with any
(32:43):
relationship that you have, right, anybody that has a long
term partner or friend, or anybody that you've been connected
with for a long time. There are days when you
feel so connected to that person, in days when you
have no idea who that person is. And so I
think the same thing goes on this path to kind
of growth and self discovery. Days when it feels really
(33:03):
right and days when it's really really difficult and that's
all part of it. And you know, I think that
is that is ultimately the I think you're you're absolutely
right when you talk about kind of the way that
questions are that key to our growth and development. And
if I have time, I can share a story actually
(33:24):
that illustrates that really nicely.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Let's do that really quickly after the break, So hang
on to it and let's grab our last break. I'm
your host, Doctor Release Cortes. We on the air with
Elizabeth Weingarten, who is a journalist and applied behavioral scientists
who works at the intersection of science and storytelling. We've
been talking about the benefits of embracing uncertainty in our
lives and questions in our lives. After the break, we're
going to talk about the opportunity to seek the right
(33:48):
sources to ask about our questions and also embracing patients.
Will be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite
a Lease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(34:30):
at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
Elise A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back
(34:53):
to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor re Lea's Cortes. As
you know by now, my program is dedicated to helping
and to empower and inspiring you along your journey to
realize more of your potential. If you want to learn
more about how we can work together and learn about
the custom Now Academy for leaders and individuals on various
journeys alike, make your way to Gusto dashnout dot com
(35:20):
and then navigate to the training tab and you'll find
the academy there. If you aren't just now joining us.
My guest is Elizabeth Weingarten, the author of How To
Fall in Love With Questions, A New Way to Thrive
in Times of uncertainty. So before the break you mentioned
this wonderful five letter word. Did someone say story.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Yes, So we were talking about loving the questions as
and the promise of loving the questions as being helping
you on that path growth and self discovery even when
it feels really difficult. And I really was so inspired
by so many of the stories that I tell in
the book, but one of them in particular, I tell
the story of a woman named Barbara Showen. And Barbara
(36:01):
is somebody who in you know, as she was growing up,
she was in a kind of more of a working
class household, and she describes not having you know, many
educational opportunities. She ended up getting really lucky in that
when she was graduating high school, she got a job
(36:22):
at a firm that offered to pay for her college.
So she gets to go to college. And she works
so hard at this job and in college, and she
starts to just kind of see her own kind of success.
She's moving up the career ladder. She's excited, she's getting
all these opportunities. She becomes this consultant, she's getting to
(36:44):
travel around the world. She's also super active, she loves cycling.
She's living this life that when she was growing up
she never could have imagined. And in the back of
her head, she keeps thinking about the fact that, you
know what, I got all these opportunities I never expected.
I want to give back at some point. But that
voice was kind of a quiet one. She just knew,
(37:04):
you know what, I want to keep moving up the ladder.
This is exciting, and I'll get to that at some point.
I'll get to that giving back idea. And so Barbara,
when she's in her early thirties, she is heading back
from a funeral with her siblings and they're they're in Michigan,
(37:25):
and they're on the road. It's a snowy day, and
she gets into a car accident. Unfortunately, she ends up
being paralyzed, and she in the aftermath of this accident,
she talks about how, of course she's struggling with so
many different questions right, so much uncertainty. It's kind of
(37:47):
hard mind boggling, frankly to imagine all the uncertainty that
kind of can come out of that experience. But something
that she said struck me and I think about it
frankly all the time, which is that amidst all of
this uncertainty and all this kind of fear that she
had about the future, she also felt this sense of relief.
And she talks about the fact that inside of this
(38:08):
uncertainty she felt a sense of freedom. And that's because
in her old life she felt like she didn't have
a choice. She had this one identity that she was building,
She had this one path forward she had to take,
she had to keep climbing up that ladder, and all
of a sudden, she had this opportunity in this you know,
uncertainty and this transformation to stretch into a new identity,
(38:33):
to change who she was and to become more of
the person who you know, that voice in the back
of her head wanted to be that person who was
maybe giving back and who was trying to help other
people find those opportunities. And so it really it's such,
I think, such an important reminder, right that you know,
sometimes we have these experiences, these uncertain experiences that can
(38:55):
feel really scary, that can feel like they're narrowing us
and our possible in life, when in fact we can
also see them as a way of gaining new freedom
and new opportunity to create new identities for ourselves.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
That sounds a bit to me like logo therapy that's
doctor Victor Frankel's work, and exister psychology that's one of
my degrees, and it's really about choosing how we relate
to whatever life throws at us. And that's another really
big thing that I love about your work is, you know,
whatever uncertainty comes at us. You know, when you first started,
(39:31):
we were talking about how we tend to be diminished
by that, we tend to shrink by that. But yet
the opportunity is to you know, step into it, to
grow into it, and see what it unfolds or activates
in us, And that's much more empowering. That's a place
that I want to help people get to.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
That's exactly right. And I think a theme that runs
throughout the book is, you know, there's so much in
the world that we can't control right now, there's so
much uncertainty around us, and yet when it comes to
the questions that we're asking, when it comes to our
own kind of sense of possibility about the future, we
have some control, right and so the question is how
(40:06):
do we take back some of that control and some
of that agency in our own lives?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
M M. That's my love language, Elizabeth. That's right there. Okay, well,
let's just briefly hit on this, because there's just a
couple other things I want to make sure I get
to as well, because I did promise our listeners and
viewers that we would talk about your perspective on the
importance of seeking the right sources to ask our questions too,
if you could address.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
That, Yeah, absolutely so, I think we all. One of
the stories that I tell in the book is about
my own experience with astrology.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yes, I'm not.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Sure how many listeners you know this. It's falls on
a spectrum right between people who are like, yes, I
love astrology and people who, you know, think it's absolutely
ridiculous and they don't subscribe to it at all. And
I would say that I fell somewhere in the middle,
probably closer to the this is ridiculous. And yet what
I describe at the book is I was gifted a
(40:59):
session within arologer for for birthday, and I went to
the astrologer and I asked this astrologer a question about
my relationship. I asked, uh, basically, if I should be
with my you know then then boyfriend now husband, And
the astrologer told me after reading our charts that the
answer was no, that he was not the right fit
(41:19):
for me, and that you know, there was almost no
way that it was going to work out between us,
and and I tell this story, and then I you know,
talked later to another astrologer who was is you know,
very very uh uh different than the original astrologer that
I spoke to, because I had been I think, you know,
(41:41):
when it comes to this question of agency and power, right,
I had this story in my head that I went
to this astrologer. They they told me, you know, this
thing that was upsetting, and I was kind of the victim,
right that I had gotten this bad kind of information,
(42:02):
and they and kind of fall into this trap of
not taking responsibility for these sources that I'm seeking when
it comes to seeking answers. Right. So, something that I
talk about in the book is that it's not it's
not wrong to seek answers to our questions, but the
problem comes when we are seeking the wrong sources as answers.
(42:24):
And in this case, I sought a source, an astrologer,
somebody that I didn't really believe or trust, with an
answer to a question that was really, you know, so
important to me, and so in the same way that
you know, if you have a question about your relationship,
you're probably not going to ask a friend who's been
(42:46):
really unlucky in love. The same goes for these questions
that we're asking, these big kind of heartwood questions, right
and and so, you know, one of the things that
I also talk about is that we're living in this
time where so many of us have become addicted to fast,
easy answers, and these come in the form of you know,
sometimes social media influencers that kind of act like gurus
(43:09):
are experts, right, they have the five steps to anybody
being happier now, right, Or you know, maybe this comes
in the form of AI.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
There are all sorts of ways in which we feel uncomfortable,
we're when we're in a time of uncertainty and we're
just desperate for those answers. And I've absolutely been there.
But I think the bigger point is how can we
take more responsibility for the sources that we're seeking out
when we do feel compelled to find those answers for
(43:42):
these big questions in our lives.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
And that brings us to the next bit here, where
I think it can feel like an eternity for us
to try to find the answers to these questions, which
is where our friend patients comes in, and you talk
about the death and rebirth of patients. If you could
briefly address that.
Speaker 4 (44:00):
Yeah, so patience is a topic that you know, maybe
some of you are kind of rolling your eyes right
now because it just I have joked with a patient's researcher,
Sarah Schnicker, that patients has a pr problem. Patients is
one of those things that you know, we'd probably all agree, yes,
I could probably stand to be more patient, But do
I want to work on my patients? Like, no, that
(44:22):
doesn't sound very fun. But what I learned is that
Sarah Schnicker, who's a professor at Baylor University in Texas,
she is really kind of the foremost expert on the
science of patients and understanding how cultivating a greater sense
of patience and ourselves is actually key to kind of
(44:44):
finding a greater sense of well being during these times
of uncertainty in our lives, and you know, maybe kind
of intuitively being able to pursue goals that are important
to us even when we feel like we've been kind
of knocked off the tracks. So you know what I
describe in the book, I talk a lot about kind
of the science of patients, but also the history of
(45:05):
patients and the fact that you know, for many years,
the idea of being patient has been has become kind
of anomalist to a failure of our modern world, a
failure of technology. So if we have to be patient,
if we're left kind of waiting for something for longer
than a few seconds, that's a bug, you know, not
a feature of life. And so I think similarly to
(45:28):
this kind of intolerance of certainty, you know, building that muscle,
patience is also a muscle that we can build, and
in doing that, really find that we're able to exist
in these periods of uncertainty and not cling after you know,
these old forms of identity or these fast, easy answers
(45:49):
that ultimately may not actually get us to where we
want to go, which is that kind of path of
growth and self discovery.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
That was incredibly rich. Okay, so we were almost through
the show already happen so fast, let's finish by situating
the idea of how listeners and viewers can develop a
questions practice. I love the eighteen point set of questions
that you have in the book, I love that, so
if you can, and we only get like about a
minute and a half to do that.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
So the basic idea that I'll share is a questions
practice is just like any other practice you have, a
meditation practice or a yoga practice. The idea is to
bring regular awareness to the questions, to the questions that
you're asking in your life. And the first step of
the practice, and I go into death in the book
on this is kind of approaching some of those big
(46:35):
and sometimes painful questions with more curiosity rather than fear.
And so that means asking questions like is this the
right question? And in the book I talk about how
to know if your question is the right question for you,
and it means really thinking about, if this isn't the
right question, what's a better or different question for me
to ask? And the point of the questions practice is
(46:57):
both to develop that deeper relationship with those big questions
in your lives, in your life and and really to
kind of be able to move forward with clarity and
not necessarily, you know, to find that you're going to
always find answers, but you're still going to be able
to move forward in your life. So it's really about
(47:17):
how do I get unstuck from this period of uncertainty
in my life, even if I don't have answers in
this moment.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
I think it's a stunning idea to have to develop
a questions practice, you know, I just think that's terrific. Okay,
So you know, I think by now that the show
has listened to what by the people around the world,
and they really care about developing themselves other than themselves
there themselves as leaders their teams or organizations. What would
you like to leave them with?
Speaker 4 (47:46):
You know, I think the biggest thing that I can
leave them with is the importance of using this kind
of questions practice as a tool to not only ask
yourself questions, but to turn it on the world too,
and to use questions as that kind of tool to
(48:08):
connect with yourself, but then to also connect with the
people who are around you, who you love. Questions are
an interpersonal superpower, right, and so I think it's really
thinking about how does the power up questions kind of
help me connect more deeply in all of these ways
in my life.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Okay, So that is eminently quotable. Questions are an interpersonal superpower.
What a way to finish. Elizabeth, thank you so much
for coming on working in purpose, for doing the work
that you're doing, for giving us a beautiful book that
you did, and coming on the program. It's been delightful
to get to know you and to learn from you.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
I have so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much
for having me and for all of your wonderful questions.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Most welcome listeners and viewers. You are going to want
to learn more about Elizabeth Weingarten, the work that she does,
and the book that she just wrote called How to
Fall in Love with Questions. You can start by visiting
her personal site, which is Elizabeth Winegart dot com. Let
me spell that for you. Elizabeth standard spelling E l
I z A b E t H and Winegarden is
w E I n g A r t e n
(49:11):
so Elizabethwinegarden dot com. Last week, if you missed the
live show, you can always catch it be a recorded podcast.
We were on air with Carolina Lasso talking about her
book The Path to Flourishing Seven Principles for a Joyful, fulfilling,
and Purposeful Life. She is a passionate firecracker of a
woman and you will love her authenticity and lessons shared.
Next week, we'll be on air with Tamar Ryan, former
(49:32):
longtime CEO of the Women's Bean Project, talking about her
book Followship Sixteen Lessons to Become a Leader Worth following.
I'm completely aligned with her message and excited to share
with share it with you. See you then, and together,
let's lean in and learn together how to make workplaces
that work for everyone, build our inspirational leadership capacity, and
find ways to do business in a way that betters
(49:54):
the world. That's work on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
We hope you enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes,
each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create a
world where business operates conscientiously, Leadership inspires and passion performance,
and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning
and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests and not
those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We
make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No
liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY
Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments
should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for
(00:20):
choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome back to the Working in a Purpose program, which
has been brought to you with passionateurprice since February of
twenty fifteen NICs for Tornadian this week. Great to have you.
I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortez. If we've not met
before and you don't know me, I'm a workforce advisor,
organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author. My
team and I at Gusto Now help companies enliven and
fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture,
(01:28):
inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose.
Many organizations are not aware of how critical it is
to invest in developing their leaders and managers not just
for their own effectiveness, but also to avoid burnout and
keep them fulfilled. And also that they can also measure
and monitor the purpose experience in their organization to keep
it working as an operational imperative. And did you know
(01:49):
that inspired employees in purpose led companies outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration and purpose are good for the
bottom line. You can learn more about us now. We
can work together at gusto dashnow dot com or my
personal site at least Coortes dot com. Getting in today's program.
We have with us today Elizabeth Weingarden. She is a
(02:09):
journalist and applied behaviors to works at the intersection of
Sytown through new book Following on Questions, A New way
to thrive in today's in Times of Uncertainty, which we'll
be talking about today. She joins us from San Francisco.
Elizabeth A hearty welcome to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited
to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
You're so welcome. I'm so glad that you were findable
on LinkedIn. When I reached out to you as we
were talking before we got on air, you and I
were engaging over a post about Jeff Wetsler, who had
had in my program earlier talking about his book relative
to seeking inquiry and feedback from others. And when I
saw your profile and the book that you've written, I
was like, you gotta come.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
On, and you said yes, you know. I love that
we were able to connect on LinkedIn, and I also
love that there's this growing community of people who are
so passionate about questions and curiosity as tool to help
us all leave more meaningful lives and filled with purpose.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
I agree and let's just show our viewers who are
tuning in, look at this beautiful thing you put into
the world. Isn't it gorgeous?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Thank you? I appreciate that we went back and forth
on the cover quite a bit, but I like where
we ended up.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I understand the cover is is one of the hardest choices.
Forget the whole book, just it's the cover totally. And
by the way, let me just say something. You know
obvious here your subtitle is about uncertainty.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
What uncertainty are you're talking about?
Speaker 3 (03:31):
We could possibly be talking about today's times.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Oh, we live in the most predictable certain worlds. Ever,
I don't think anybody no, it's so funny. I didn't
when I started writing this book. I could never have
anticipated how much uncertainty would grow to the extent that
it has been and was when this book came out
on this past spring. But you know, I very much
(03:57):
wanted this book to be a a guide for people
who are finding themselves feeling stuck in uncertainty. And we
can talk about that a little bit more. But the
definition that I begin the book with is like, what
is uncertainty? Right? We talk about uncertainty all the time,
but uncertainty, as I bring in this definition from a
(04:18):
couple of psychologists, is a sense of doubt that stops
or delays progress in action. So it's really that feeling
of I don't have the answers, I don't know what's
going on, and I feel like I can't move forward.
And so the question is how do we actually move
forward when we don't have all the answers in our lives?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah? Yeah, I thought it was really beautiful how you
talked about that, and I want to get to more
of Well, let me just situate a couple things that
One thing in particular that I got out of that
particular aspect of it is that you said that research
suggests that we tend to exploit options that are familiar
to us rather than exploring new choices, even though the
best choice is generally to alternate between exploiting what's familiar
(04:58):
and exploring what's new. I think that's really that's key
that you are situating throughout your book, this notion that
we tend to harken back to what's familiar or already
known about us. I think that's a really important thing
that we need to fire it out for this conversation.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
Yeah, I think that's right, and I think that in
times of uncertainty, there's this tendency to be afraid of
the unknown. Right. And we can talk about this a
little bit more, but we're wired as humans to want
to avoid uncertainty and seek certainty, seek the known at
any cost, and part of that is how we evolve
(05:33):
evolutionarily speaking. It takes more, it takes more energy for
us to deal with uncertainty, and when food was scarce,
we were evolving to try to make do with less
energy intensive activities, less food, right. So we're really trying
still in our modern age, to try to avoid any
(05:53):
activities that make us spend more energy than we need to.
So we're trying to seek what's known and seek what's certain.
But when we do that, we end up cutting ourselves
off from possibilities, from different kind of ways of being
in the world. That could end up, you know, leading
us to really kind of exciting futures. But it's understandable
(06:14):
we kind of have this, We have this desire to
cling to the known and too the certain, and we
end up making a lot of fear based decisions based
on that versus decisions based on curiosity and that desire
to explore.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yes, for sure. One of the things I always find
fascinating is where these ideas come from. You know, over
the ten and a half years I've been hosting this podcast,
I've talked to so many authors in that time, right,
And so a book comes from somewhere, And of course
I read your book, so I know where yours came from.
But our listeners and viewers who haven't yet maybe pick
it up, don't. So let's in this early part of
(06:49):
our conversation talk about how this book came to be
and what you were going through to try to learn
and grapple with what you were dealing with at the time.
That help you get acquainted with this notion of relation
too uncertainty the way that you do now.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, So this book really emerged during a time
in my life when I was buckling under really heavy questions.
And this was actually during the pandemic, and so a
very I'm sure nobody else was dealing with uncertainty at
that life, right the the time when everybody was probably
asking some big questions. For me, the questions were about
(07:25):
my marriage and about my career. And so I'll give
you all a little bit of context. I had been
in a relationship for several years at that point, but
we had recently gotten married kind of we were a
few months in to the marriage. I had long kind
of felt this kind of pushing pull in my relationship.
(07:45):
I felt pulled to my husband because there were so
many ways that he challenged me that the relationship was
kind of helping me become a better person. I loved him,
you know, passionately, and at the same time, we were
very different people, and so there was a lot of
friction in the relationship too. And so I had always
(08:08):
kind of felt equal parts love and doubt and this
question of is this the right person for me should
be together? And I was asking this question a few
months after we got married, and it was getting louder
because of some factors that I talk a little bit
about in the book. So I'm holding onto this question of,
(08:29):
you know, should we get a divorce? And for anybody
that's ever had that question, it's a very scary, heavy
question to be dealing with. It can feel very lonely,
it can feel very isolating. So that's question number one.
Question number two. I had also recently left a job
to pursue a creative project that was really meaningful to me,
(08:49):
and I was at this point I had been working
on it for many months, and I had just been
told by somebody who I was working with on this
project that the direction that I had sunk all of
this time and energy into was not working. And so
I met this crossroads in my relationship. I met this
(09:10):
crossroads in my career where all of a sudden, this
thing that I thought was going to be my next
big break, my next big project, that's not working out,
and so I'm wondering what am I doing with my life?
And I at that point was feeling kind of rather
desperate to find some answers to these questions. And the
(09:32):
advice that I kept finding again and again in self
help and pop psychology books was just to kind of quote,
embrace uncertainty. And I'm sure if you've heard that advice before,
but perhaps that will sound familiar. It's everywhere, and to me,
when I read things telling me to embrace uncertainty, it
felt so unhelpful because I think sometimes in life, sure
(09:56):
we want to embrace uncertainty. Right, Maybe your family is
planning a surprise for your birthday. Great that's fun uncertainty.
I'm happy to embrace that. But for me, the uncertainty
in my life felt so painful and so scary that
it wasn't something that I wanted to embrace, and it
almost felt like this form of kind of toxic positivity. So,
(10:16):
you know, it was around that time that, luckily, I
discovered a much older book that for me contained what
was much better, if not more challenging advice. And that
book was Letters to a Young Poet. And for those
who aren't familiar with this book, it's a book of
correspondence between the Austrian poet Rainier and Maria Wilka and
(10:36):
a nineteen year old aspiring poet by the name of
Franz Cappus. And it's from the early twentieth century. And
it's a book that counts people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Hoffman,
Marilyn Monroe among its fans. And I learned in writing
this book actually that Lady Gagat even has a line
from it tattooed on her, so it has has quite
an interesting kind of modern history too. So the whole
(11:00):
book is beautiful, but I was really struck by one
part of it, in particular, and that's part where Cappus
is asking Rilka for all kinds of advice, not only
about how to become a poet, but also how to
live his life. And you know, of course, if you
know a nineteen year old, you know that they're full
of questions, right, But at the end of the day,
Franz Cappus could be any of us. We're all asking
(11:22):
questions at any point in our life. But what makes
this book so remarkable is that Rilka famously responds not
with an answer to Cappus per se, but by telling
him how important it is to quote love the questions
themselves if they were locked rooms or books written in
a foreign language. And he advises Cappus to not search
(11:44):
for the answers now and talks about the importance of
living the questions. But of course Rilka never explained what
he meant by living the questions now or how to
think about loving the questions, And he also wasn't thinking
about really how to do this in a time of
AI and Google and smartphones and social media influencers. So
(12:05):
the book is really an exploration of, you know, how
do we fall in love with the questions of our lives,
particularly the ones that can be really painful, and especially
in a culture in which so many of us have
become addicted to fast, easy answers.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
M okay. So I get delighted when my authors that
come on my podcast do something like you did in
your book. Or you've taken what you've did that that
that piece of work, and you've now and you threw it,
strown it through your whole entire books, so that every
chapter really starts with a snippet from some of that correspondence.
It's delicious, Elizabeth, It's just delicious. So I really like
(12:42):
how you brought us in and then how you used
that text to teach from, to illuminate with and some
of the pros is just delightful. So I just want
to say that while we while we talked about while
we're on this subject, you did mention that the bit
about smartphones, and I was really captivated with what you
wrote in the book that you reference someone in Carlton
(13:04):
who I think might be a researcher and how they
became very curious about the widespread smartphone use and how
it might be influencing our collective capacity to tolerate uncertainty.
And he doesn't draw a direct correlation. But it's quite
an interesting idea if in fact, you know this idea
that we can always look at our phone really quickly
look anything up that would it would certainly it wouldn't
(13:27):
be surprising to me that that would actually contribute to
our inability or our unwillingness to want to embrace uncertainty,
can you say a bit more?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Absolutely so, if we think about our tolerance for uncertainty
as a muscle, right, you can think about, you know,
if you're if you're going to the gym once a
month or once a year, you're not going to think
of yourself as somebody that is, you know, really strengthening
your muscles and really fit, versus if you're somebody that
is maybe doing some kind of strength, strength training or
(13:59):
exercise is multiple times a week. And so the same
goes with really figuring out how to increase that tolerance
for uncertainty. Tolerance for uncertainty, as I mentioned earlier, is
not something that comes naturally to us as humans. It's difficult,
and so the idea is how do we build up
that strength and that tolerance. And so the point that
(14:19):
Carlton Nicholas Carlton, who is a psychology professor at the
University of Regina and Canada. His research is really interesting
because it suggests that we're losing all of these opportunities
to strengthen that uncertainty tolerance muscle every time we do
little things during the day. So, for instance, you're about
(14:42):
to go to a new restaurant. If you're like me,
you immediately google the menu, right, And there's nothing inherently
wrong with that. It's fun to check it out. But
the point is that there are lots of little opportunities
to kind of sit with the discomfort of on certainty
and kind of be with whatever emotions you're feeling in
(15:04):
that moment. And so whether it's you know what, I'm
just going to wait and see what the menu is
when I get there, or I'm traveling to a new city,
I'm not going to map out everything I'm doing every day.
I'm going to wander around and see what I find.
And maybe it's not. Maybe every day isn't this kind
(15:25):
of optimized version of travel, But that's okay, that's kind
of I'm leaning into that uncertainty and the unpredictability of life.
So I think his point, you know, is, I've found
it really interesting and kind of trying to think about
how do I build some of those moments into my
(15:45):
day to day life so that when I'm dealing with
these bigger life uncertainties, I have a foundation from which
to kind of draw more strength to deal with some
of that kind of bigger picture uncertainty.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
I love that. Let's build our uncertainty muscles. Shall we
on that note? Let's grab our first break. I'm your host,
Doctor e Release Cortes. We're in the air with Elizabeth Weiningarden,
who is a journalist and applied behavioral scientists who works
at the intersection of science and storytelling. We've been talking
about where this book came from, why is navigating uncertainty
so powerful and opportunistic for us? After the break, we're
(16:20):
going to do a quick dive into what does a
life of loving questions look like and talk about the
four ways that Elizabeth encourages us to embrace questions for
different kinds of questions. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose
and inspired leadership and meaning infuse cultures that elevate fulfillment,
performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or
to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please
(17:10):
visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how
to get your employees working on purpose. This is working
on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program
today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an
email to a lease a Lise at eliscortes dot com.
(17:33):
Now back to working on purpose.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Thanks foresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am dedicated
to helping create a world where organizations thrive because their
people thrive are led by inspirational leaders that help them
find and contribute their greatness, and we do business that
betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books.
So one of my latest came out is called The
Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically enliven
(18:01):
your business. And I wanted to help leaders understand today's
discerning and diverse workforce. What do they want to need
to give their best and want to stay, and then
I give you twenty two best practices to equip you
to provide that and do your culture so they will.
You can find my books on Amazon or my website
at least quortest dot com if you are just joining us.
My guest is Elizabeth Weingarten, the author of How To
(18:22):
Fall in Love With Questions, A New Way to Thrive
in Times of Uncertainty. So before we dive back into
what we were talking about, I want to share with
you briefly because I think you'll appreciate that given what
you share. Just before went on break, I had a
gentleman on named David Pearl on my podcast some time ago,
and he runs an organization called Street Wisdom, and essentially
(18:43):
that he's in the UK, but they do these things
all over the world. They do walk shops or people
literally might have a question on their mind and then
they're sort of ushered into this mental space of being
able to enjoy and fall into the moment. And then
they are released into the city and they do a
kind of a you know, they walk through a city
and they might just notice what the city is telling
(19:04):
them is. They walk through and sometimes they get some
new insights or a new way of looking at things,
et cetera. It's really quite delightful. So I just wanted
to share that because I thought you might really jam
on that idea.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
I love that. I mean, I think and we can
get to this in a little bit. But one of
the reasons I love kind of this practice of developing
a greater awareness of the question that you're asking in
your life, and I talk in the book about developing
a question's practice is because I think questions can act
as really powerful filters for the world. Right when you
(19:37):
become aware of a question that you're asking, to your
point at least, it really helps to filter in what
are some of the possible kind of answers and insights
that you may not have been aware of without kind
of bringing that awareness first to the big question that
you're asking.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
And on that note, now it's a good time for
us to talk about those four different kinds of questions
or ways you help us relate to questions Like parts
of fruit tree. That's just so creative. So let's talk
about the four different kinds of questions. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
Absolutely so. When I first started writing the book and
I would talk to people about it, they'd be like, okay,
so what type of questions are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Right? Like?
Speaker 4 (20:16):
Are we talking about what's for dinner? You know, how
can I be happy? So, of course there are lots
of different types of questions in the world, and when
we talk about developing a different relationship to our questions
so that we can then have a different relationship to uncertainty,
it helps to really know what type of question are
we asking. And when I go through this framework, I
(20:38):
think keep in mind if you're somebody that's asking a
question right now, knowing what type of question you're asking
can help you understand your expectations for that question. And
what I mean by that is how much should you
be waiting around for an answer to that question? Is
it time to let that question go? So let me
kind of start with the first part of this four
(20:59):
part fruit tree. So the first type of question is
a peach question, and like a peach these are the
types of questions that ripen rather quickly into an answer. Right,
So it's a question like will I get the job,
You're going to know pretty quickly the answer to that question.
So that's your peach style question. The second style question
is a paw paw style question, and so powpaw frute
(21:21):
I learned while reporting this book it takes the pawpaw
tree sometimes five to seven years to actually grow the
poppaf fruit. So these are questions that are a little
bit longer term, but they are questions that you're still
ultimately going to get the answer to. So maybe it's
a question like, you know, am I going to find
fulfillment and satisfaction in this career change that I'm making.
(21:45):
So the third type of question is the heartwood question.
And heartwood is the part of the tree that actually
stays with the tree for its entire life. It's the
core of the tree. The bark grows around the heartwood
in circles. And so you can think about your heartwood
questions as the questions that they stay with you over
the course of your life. They evolve as you evolve.
(22:08):
And so these are the questions like who am I?
Who am I becoming? How do I live a life
of meaning in purpose? These are the questions that aren't
ever answerable in a permanent way. Right, maybe you have
an answer at one time in your life, but at
a different time you reopen the question and you explore
it anew The fourth type of question is a deadly
(22:30):
and this is the type of question that maybe at
one point it served a purpose, it no longer serves
a purpose in your life. It is a question to
let go of. And these are the questions in our
lives that are really kind of keeping us stuck in
patterns of rumination and regret. Questions about you know, why
didn't I break up with this person? What if I
(22:52):
had just taken that other career path, the kind of
what if should have all of that language that is,
you know, fundamentally not moving you forward into a new place.
It's keeping you stuck in the past, in a place
where you're not growing. So those are you know, that's
kind of the gist of the types of questions. And
(23:13):
I think as you kind of move into a question's
practice and kind of becoming a little bit more aware
of your questions, it can really help to have that
deeper understanding of kind of what type of question am
I asking and what can I expect from that question?
Speaker 3 (23:27):
I think it's very powerful and just having even just
that ability to segment questions like that, and then also
to your point, recognizing, I know from me I've gone
through periods in my life when I spend way too
much time in the dead leaves variety, way too much time.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
Right, I think you're similar to so many people, right,
I think there are often so many kind of dead
leaves wrestling around, you know, in there. But I'm curious
to hear you know, do you have a like a
paw paw or a heartwood question that's been on your
mind in this moment?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Well, I would say the heartwood question for me is
always unfolding. So I am a person who has I
have stepped on to the path of purpose, right, I
mean this has been a chosen, intentional path, and it
hasn't necessarily been an easy path. It's not necessarily convenient
to live your purpose per se. You have to be
obedient to it if you're going to really answer it,
(24:21):
and there's a lot of other ways to live life.
I would say, in an easier fashion, what then to
really pursue and give yourself over to purpose? So I
would say that I do question, you know, how is
this going to unfold? For me? It has continued to unfold.
And I never would have imagined, Elizabeth some ten years
(24:41):
ago that I would have five books out and that
we would have stood up the Gusto Now Academy, which
has nine different learning communities to it. I never would
have imagined we would have done that. And yet I
know there is so much more beyond this, but I
don't know what it is. And I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with the uncertainty. But it's a sort of
like giving myself a over to that open space that
(25:02):
is part of my dance with life when I'm learning
as well.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
You know, it reminds me. One of the stories that
I tell in the book is about the educator and
activist Parker Palmer, who who very much. He's written many
best selling beautiful books, one called Let Your Life Speak,
and it's you know, at the at the core, so
much of what he writes and talks about is, you know,
(25:29):
staying true to what you know. He describes in his
work the things that you can't not do yes, yes, yes, yes,
And and I think I hear that and what you're
saying just kind of you know, acknowledging, Hey, there's this
other path over here that would probably be a lot
easier for me, but then there's this other work and
I can't not do it. And he jokes he knows
(25:50):
it's a double negative, but it's the truest way for
him to say it, right, I say, I use that
exact phrase all the time.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
What can you not not do? Yeah? You know, And
so that's really powerful. So thank you for letting me,
for indulging me into this, because this is a big
reason why I keep doing this podcast, Elizabeth, is because
it is a catalyzing agent for me, because I read
my guest books cover to cover every week, and then
we write a newsletter article next and the following week
about it. To apply the concepts. I mean, this stuff
(26:17):
works in me.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
I seek it.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You know this is this is not something that you know.
I don't audit this experience. So thank you for letting me. Also,
you know, swim in the questions too. And speaking of
Parker Palmer, and I do have a couple of his books.
You do reference him and Rockwell and Jamati. But I
want to situate for our listeners and viewers, what does
a life of loving questions look like or what might
(26:42):
it look like for people give us give them a
bit of a promise or what that what that could be?
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Yeah? Absolutely, so I should say the whole kind of
second part of the book is really devoted to exploring,
through both science and story, what this can look like.
It was really important to me to not just kind
of provide here's the five steps to doing this right,
but to really look at the lives of real people
(27:10):
who have really tried to organize their kind of thinking
and their actions and behavior around this idea of loving
the questions. And I think you know one way to
think about this. And something that I observed and really
almost everybody that I talked to, is that a life
(27:31):
spent kind of loving and living your questions is a
life when you are kind of continuously being led back
to yourself and your relationship with yourself. And something that
I found in the book is that a relationship, our
relationship to uncertainty is actually really just a reflection of
our relationship to ourselves. And so people who are kind
(27:52):
of spending their lives really kind of focused on this
deeper exploration of questions, bringing deeper awareness to the question
in their lives. And again, I we can talk about
this maybe later. I have a whole kind of approach.
What I talk about is a questions practice, kind of
a guided way of getting into that yourself. But what
(28:13):
you find from people that are that are kind of
using questions, they're using them as kind of an internal
GPS or an internal compass, kind of leading them back
to what do I really want? Who do I really
want to be? And and you can see this in
Parker Palmer's story. He was somebody who grew up kind
(28:35):
of as the Golden Boy, as he describes it. He
you know, he people kind of had a lot of
expectations for him, who he should be, what success looked
like for him. And as he kind of went further
and further in his academics in his career, he started
to feel like those expectations we were sitting heavy on
(28:56):
his shoulders and that they just weren't right for him.
That he was feeling called to go on a very
different path, a path that he kind of often describes
as going into the into the woods and ended up,
you know, instead of going down this path of being
an academic at a prestigious academic institution, he ends up first, uh,
(29:19):
you know, becoming uh uh, taking some time at a
at a Quaker organization kind of learning all of the
uh kind of traditions of this like Quaker community, spending
many years there in this kind of educational community and
ultimately becoming a writer and educator and activist who has
(29:41):
moved and inspired you know, millions of people around the world.
And uh, but he writes about how and he talked
to me about how difficult this was at many stages
of his life, but that ultimately it was these big
questions that were foundational to him continuously finding hi way
back to himself what he wanted apart from the shoulds right,
(30:04):
who we should be on what we should want to do.
But and this relates to I think a really key
part of having a questions practice, which is asking yourself.
You know, am I asking the right questions in my life?
And we can perhaps talk about that a little bit more,
but I'd say that's really one of the central parts
of living a life of of and being inspired by
(30:29):
your questions.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
And one more thing to situate that into my world
because really, so much of what I've cared about in
my practice as an organizational psychologist and working in organizations
with leadership and development is it is growing people into
their higher potential. And so one of the things that
we've sort of been talking about through this conversation already.
But I want to hit this specifically. You have a
(30:53):
couple of lines in your book that if you could
speak to them that I think are just really, really alluring.
It can help our listeners and viewers maybe change their
relationship to how they're viewing uncertainty, and the lines are
as an uncertainty. As uncertainty amplifies who we are, it
can also reveal parts of us that before before we've
been able to ignore or suppress or deny. At least
(31:15):
for me, that's you. A big part of what's uncomfortable
about living with uncertainty results from resisting this revolution and
clinging to an old identity or way of being. I
think that's really powerful. And when we help our listeners
and viewers recognize that, when we don't allow ourselves to
relate to uncertainty in a more open fashion, that we
(31:36):
are resisting our own growth, and I think that's really powerful.
Speaker 4 (31:39):
That's exactly right. You hit it on the head. The
fundamentally loving your questions is about embracing your own growth
and embracing the fact that it can be really hard
and scary. The paths of growth, can you know, is
not an easy one, but ultimately it can be one
of the most fulfilling and rewarding ones. And I think
(32:01):
about this when I think also about kind of going
back to Rilka, this poet you know, who inspired the
book largely. Rilka has a very nuanced take on love,
and he writes about love as the most difficult task
that we undertake in our lives and yet the most
rewarding one. Right, So it's far from this kind of
(32:22):
toxic positivity of embrace uncertainty, loving the questions really acknowledges that,
you know, when we're in relationship with these questions of
our lives, some days we're going to love that experience
and want to give it a hug, and other days
we're going to, you know, really feel frustrated and fed
up with it, just the way you would with any
(32:43):
relationship that you have, right, anybody that has a long
term partner or friend, or anybody that you've been connected
with for a long time. There are days when you
feel so connected to that person, in days when you
have no idea who that person is. And so I
think the same thing goes on this path to kind
of growth and self discovery. Days when it feels really
(33:03):
right and days when it's really really difficult and that's
all part of it. And you know, I think that
is that is ultimately the I think you're you're absolutely
right when you talk about kind of the way that
questions are that key to our growth and development. And
if I have time, I can share a story actually
(33:24):
that illustrates that really nicely.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Let's do that really quickly after the break, So hang
on to it and let's grab our last break. I'm
your host, Doctor Release Cortes. We on the air with
Elizabeth Weingarten, who is a journalist and applied behavioral scientists
who works at the intersection of science and storytelling. We've
been talking about the benefits of embracing uncertainty in our
lives and questions in our lives. After the break, we're
going to talk about the opportunity to seek the right
(33:48):
sources to ask about our questions and also embracing patients.
Will be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite
a Lease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(34:30):
at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
Elise A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back
(34:53):
to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor re Lea's Cortes. As
you know by now, my program is dedicated to helping
and to empower and inspiring you along your journey to
realize more of your potential. If you want to learn
more about how we can work together and learn about
the custom Now Academy for leaders and individuals on various
journeys alike, make your way to Gusto dashnout dot com
(35:20):
and then navigate to the training tab and you'll find
the academy there. If you aren't just now joining us.
My guest is Elizabeth Weingarten, the author of How To
Fall in Love With Questions, A New Way to Thrive
in Times of uncertainty. So before the break you mentioned
this wonderful five letter word. Did someone say story.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
Yes, So we were talking about loving the questions as
and the promise of loving the questions as being helping
you on that path growth and self discovery even when
it feels really difficult. And I really was so inspired
by so many of the stories that I tell in
the book, but one of them in particular, I tell
the story of a woman named Barbara Showen. And Barbara
(36:01):
is somebody who in you know, as she was growing up,
she was in a kind of more of a working
class household, and she describes not having you know, many
educational opportunities. She ended up getting really lucky in that
when she was graduating high school, she got a job
(36:22):
at a firm that offered to pay for her college.
So she gets to go to college. And she works
so hard at this job and in college, and she
starts to just kind of see her own kind of success.
She's moving up the career ladder. She's excited, she's getting
all these opportunities. She becomes this consultant, she's getting to
(36:44):
travel around the world. She's also super active, she loves cycling.
She's living this life that when she was growing up
she never could have imagined. And in the back of
her head, she keeps thinking about the fact that, you
know what, I got all these opportunities I never expected.
I want to give back at some point. But that
voice was kind of a quiet one. She just knew,
(37:04):
you know what, I want to keep moving up the ladder.
This is exciting, and I'll get to that at some point.
I'll get to that giving back idea. And so Barbara,
when she's in her early thirties, she is heading back
from a funeral with her siblings and they're they're in Michigan,
(37:25):
and they're on the road. It's a snowy day, and
she gets into a car accident. Unfortunately, she ends up
being paralyzed, and she in the aftermath of this accident,
she talks about how, of course she's struggling with so
many different questions right, so much uncertainty. It's kind of
(37:47):
hard mind boggling, frankly to imagine all the uncertainty that
kind of can come out of that experience. But something
that she said struck me and I think about it
frankly all the time, which is that amidst all of
this uncertainty and all this kind of fear that she
had about the future, she also felt this sense of relief.
And she talks about the fact that inside of this
(38:08):
uncertainty she felt a sense of freedom. And that's because
in her old life she felt like she didn't have
a choice. She had this one identity that she was building,
She had this one path forward she had to take,
she had to keep climbing up that ladder, and all
of a sudden, she had this opportunity in this you know,
uncertainty and this transformation to stretch into a new identity,
(38:33):
to change who she was and to become more of
the person who you know, that voice in the back
of her head wanted to be that person who was
maybe giving back and who was trying to help other
people find those opportunities. And so it really it's such,
I think, such an important reminder, right that you know,
sometimes we have these experiences, these uncertain experiences that can
(38:55):
feel really scary, that can feel like they're narrowing us
and our possible in life, when in fact we can
also see them as a way of gaining new freedom
and new opportunity to create new identities for ourselves.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
That sounds a bit to me like logo therapy that's
doctor Victor Frankel's work, and exister psychology that's one of
my degrees, and it's really about choosing how we relate
to whatever life throws at us. And that's another really
big thing that I love about your work is, you know,
whatever uncertainty comes at us. You know, when you first started,
(39:31):
we were talking about how we tend to be diminished
by that, we tend to shrink by that. But yet
the opportunity is to you know, step into it, to
grow into it, and see what it unfolds or activates
in us, And that's much more empowering. That's a place
that I want to help people get to.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
That's exactly right. And I think a theme that runs
throughout the book is, you know, there's so much in
the world that we can't control right now, there's so
much uncertainty around us, and yet when it comes to
the questions that we're asking, when it comes to our
own kind of sense of possibility about the future, we
have some control, right and so the question is how
(40:06):
do we take back some of that control and some
of that agency in our own lives?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
M M. That's my love language, Elizabeth. That's right there. Okay, well,
let's just briefly hit on this, because there's just a
couple other things I want to make sure I get
to as well, because I did promise our listeners and
viewers that we would talk about your perspective on the
importance of seeking the right sources to ask our questions too,
if you could address.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
That, Yeah, absolutely so, I think we all. One of
the stories that I tell in the book is about
my own experience with astrology.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yes, I'm not.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Sure how many listeners you know this. It's falls on
a spectrum right between people who are like, yes, I
love astrology and people who, you know, think it's absolutely
ridiculous and they don't subscribe to it at all. And
I would say that I fell somewhere in the middle,
probably closer to the this is ridiculous. And yet what
I describe at the book is I was gifted a
(40:59):
session within arologer for for birthday, and I went to
the astrologer and I asked this astrologer a question about
my relationship. I asked, uh, basically, if I should be
with my you know then then boyfriend now husband, And
the astrologer told me after reading our charts that the
answer was no, that he was not the right fit
(41:19):
for me, and that you know, there was almost no
way that it was going to work out between us,
and and I tell this story, and then I you know,
talked later to another astrologer who was is you know,
very very uh uh different than the original astrologer that
I spoke to, because I had been I think, you know,
(41:41):
when it comes to this question of agency and power, right,
I had this story in my head that I went
to this astrologer. They they told me, you know, this
thing that was upsetting, and I was kind of the victim,
right that I had gotten this bad kind of information,
(42:02):
and they and kind of fall into this trap of
not taking responsibility for these sources that I'm seeking when
it comes to seeking answers. Right. So, something that I
talk about in the book is that it's not it's
not wrong to seek answers to our questions, but the
problem comes when we are seeking the wrong sources as answers.
(42:24):
And in this case, I sought a source, an astrologer,
somebody that I didn't really believe or trust, with an
answer to a question that was really, you know, so
important to me, and so in the same way that
you know, if you have a question about your relationship,
you're probably not going to ask a friend who's been
(42:46):
really unlucky in love. The same goes for these questions
that we're asking, these big kind of heartwood questions, right
and and so, you know, one of the things that
I also talk about is that we're living in this
time where so many of us have become addicted to fast,
easy answers, and these come in the form of you know,
sometimes social media influencers that kind of act like gurus
(43:09):
are experts, right, they have the five steps to anybody
being happier now, right, Or you know, maybe this comes
in the form of AI.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
There are all sorts of ways in which we feel uncomfortable,
we're when we're in a time of uncertainty and we're
just desperate for those answers. And I've absolutely been there.
But I think the bigger point is how can we
take more responsibility for the sources that we're seeking out
when we do feel compelled to find those answers for
(43:42):
these big questions in our lives.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
And that brings us to the next bit here, where
I think it can feel like an eternity for us
to try to find the answers to these questions, which
is where our friend patients comes in, and you talk
about the death and rebirth of patients. If you could
briefly address that.
Speaker 4 (44:00):
Yeah, so patience is a topic that you know, maybe
some of you are kind of rolling your eyes right
now because it just I have joked with a patient's researcher,
Sarah Schnicker, that patients has a pr problem. Patients is
one of those things that you know, we'd probably all agree, yes,
I could probably stand to be more patient, But do
I want to work on my patients? Like, no, that
(44:22):
doesn't sound very fun. But what I learned is that
Sarah Schnicker, who's a professor at Baylor University in Texas,
she is really kind of the foremost expert on the
science of patients and understanding how cultivating a greater sense
of patience and ourselves is actually key to kind of
(44:44):
finding a greater sense of well being during these times
of uncertainty in our lives, and you know, maybe kind
of intuitively being able to pursue goals that are important
to us even when we feel like we've been kind
of knocked off the tracks. So you know what I
describe in the book, I talk a lot about kind
of the science of patients, but also the history of
(45:05):
patients and the fact that you know, for many years,
the idea of being patient has been has become kind
of anomalist to a failure of our modern world, a
failure of technology. So if we have to be patient,
if we're left kind of waiting for something for longer
than a few seconds, that's a bug, you know, not
a feature of life. And so I think similarly to
(45:28):
this kind of intolerance of certainty, you know, building that muscle,
patience is also a muscle that we can build, and
in doing that, really find that we're able to exist
in these periods of uncertainty and not cling after you know,
these old forms of identity or these fast, easy answers
(45:49):
that ultimately may not actually get us to where we
want to go, which is that kind of path of
growth and self discovery.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
That was incredibly rich. Okay, so we were almost through
the show already happen so fast, let's finish by situating
the idea of how listeners and viewers can develop a
questions practice. I love the eighteen point set of questions
that you have in the book, I love that, so
if you can, and we only get like about a
minute and a half to do that.
Speaker 4 (46:15):
So the basic idea that I'll share is a questions
practice is just like any other practice you have, a
meditation practice or a yoga practice. The idea is to
bring regular awareness to the questions, to the questions that
you're asking in your life. And the first step of
the practice, and I go into death in the book
on this is kind of approaching some of those big
(46:35):
and sometimes painful questions with more curiosity rather than fear.
And so that means asking questions like is this the
right question? And in the book I talk about how
to know if your question is the right question for you,
and it means really thinking about, if this isn't the
right question, what's a better or different question for me
to ask? And the point of the questions practice is
(46:57):
both to develop that deeper relationship with those big questions
in your lives, in your life and and really to
kind of be able to move forward with clarity and
not necessarily, you know, to find that you're going to
always find answers, but you're still going to be able
to move forward in your life. So it's really about
(47:17):
how do I get unstuck from this period of uncertainty
in my life, even if I don't have answers in
this moment.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
I think it's a stunning idea to have to develop
a questions practice, you know, I just think that's terrific. Okay,
So you know, I think by now that the show
has listened to what by the people around the world,
and they really care about developing themselves other than themselves
there themselves as leaders their teams or organizations. What would
you like to leave them with?
Speaker 4 (47:46):
You know, I think the biggest thing that I can
leave them with is the importance of using this kind
of questions practice as a tool to not only ask
yourself questions, but to turn it on the world too,
and to use questions as that kind of tool to
(48:08):
connect with yourself, but then to also connect with the
people who are around you, who you love. Questions are
an interpersonal superpower, right, and so I think it's really
thinking about how does the power up questions kind of
help me connect more deeply in all of these ways
in my life.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Okay, So that is eminently quotable. Questions are an interpersonal superpower.
What a way to finish. Elizabeth, thank you so much
for coming on working in purpose, for doing the work
that you're doing, for giving us a beautiful book that
you did, and coming on the program. It's been delightful
to get to know you and to learn from you.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
I have so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much
for having me and for all of your wonderful questions.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Most welcome listeners and viewers. You are going to want
to learn more about Elizabeth Weingarten, the work that she does,
and the book that she just wrote called How to
Fall in Love with Questions. You can start by visiting
her personal site, which is Elizabeth Winegart dot com. Let
me spell that for you. Elizabeth standard spelling E l
I z A b E t H and Winegarden is
w E I n g A r t e n
(49:11):
so Elizabethwinegarden dot com. Last week, if you missed the
live show, you can always catch it be a recorded podcast.
We were on air with Carolina Lasso talking about her
book The Path to Flourishing Seven Principles for a Joyful, fulfilling,
and Purposeful Life. She is a passionate firecracker of a
woman and you will love her authenticity and lessons shared.
Next week, we'll be on air with Tamar Ryan, former
(49:32):
longtime CEO of the Women's Bean Project, talking about her
book Followship Sixteen Lessons to Become a Leader Worth following.
I'm completely aligned with her message and excited to share
with share it with you. See you then, and together,
let's lean in and learn together how to make workplaces
that work for everyone, build our inspirational leadership capacity, and
find ways to do business in a way that betters
(49:54):
the world. That's work on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
We hope you enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes,
each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create a
world where business operates conscientiously, Leadership inspires and passion performance,
and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning
and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.
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