April 16, 2025 • 32 mins
BEST OF
In the face of uncertainty and change, how do you ensure you don’t feel lost and defeated?
More importantly, how do you ensure that doesn’t happen to the team you lead?
Dr Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is the Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp and she sees firsthand their cross discipline research into what can be done to help human flourishing.
Professionally she advises Fortune 500 CEOs and CHROs and contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Scientific American Mind,
Her book Tomorrowmind, co-authored by Professor Martin Seligman provides research on how to navigate the never-ending cycles of change and unprecedented uncertainty that we are all facing in the present working climate.
In this episode Gabriella shares:
- Her tricks on how you can bring creativity into your workforce
- Why you need to help your team develop their own sense of meaning if you want them remain with you long term.
- How to build resilience and use it to survive uncertain times and challenging times
- Why prospection is a key skill for every leader who wants to grow their teams trust
- How to master the stories you tell yourself to turn setbacks into growth
Key Quotes:
“Prospection, our ability to see and plan for the future is an essential part of what builds peoples trust in leaders today."
"Recognition is an antidote and it's almost a vaccine for a crisis of mattering."
“Resilience doesn't mean that it doesn’t feel incredibly painful and challenging and you may cry and scream and be furious."
Find Gabriella’s book via her website or connect with her on Linkedin.
My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How I Work is having a little breakover Easter, so
I have hand picked one of my favorite episodes to
play for you today and I will be back with
new interviews from Thursday May one. When it comes to
your work, do you have a sense of purpose and
meaning that you can turn back to when things are hard?
(00:21):
And how about your team? How connected are they to
why their work matters? Doctor Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is an author,
a Harvard trained physician, and the chief innovation officer at
Better Up, and she thinks about these questions a lot.
Her research with Professor Martin Seligman on Thriving in Times
of uncertainty provides some really interesting insights into how we
(00:44):
can keep thriving at work even when things are tough.
In this episode, Gabriella shares why it is so important
that you ensure your team has a sense of meaning,
the five biggest drivers of resilience and they're probably not
what you think they are, and why prospection is one
of the most important leadership skills for the future. Welcome
(01:13):
to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and
strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha
imber with her work it better up Ensuring quick, effective
ways to come up with the most creative solutions is
an essential part of Gabriella's day to day, so I
wanted to find out what some of her go to
(01:33):
rituals and habits are when she needs to be thinking creatively.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So one of the strongest findings in creativity research around
individual differences is this personality tape. That's openness to experience.
So people who sort of wander around feeling wide eyed
about the world, and I feel very blessed that I
have that personality tape. My father's a great exact sample
of that to me. He wanders around the world noticing
(02:03):
things and asking questions, and he can have a conversation
with anyone and feel genuinely curious and like you really
learn something new. And I do feel that way a
lot of the time. I don't take it for granted.
And as I've learned more about how to help people
become more creative, a lot of it is how do
you grow more into embracing some of the practices that
(02:24):
constitute openness to experience. When I'm trying to be really
deliberate about this, if I'm starting on a new topic
in a new area I want to learn more about.
I try to read broadly about it, so I will
try to get, you know, the canonical books and textbooks,
but then also try to reach back into my own
(02:45):
memory bank of things that might be tangentially related. They
may not themselves end up being useful, but they might
be a bridge to something else that's useful, or they
might just sort of awaken a part of my brain
that wasn't paying attention to the topic that now can
be engaged and connecting. And when we think about the
default mode network, which is this daydreaming network, it's where
(03:07):
all these rich ideas about creativity come from, somewhat non
consciously and spontaneously. We know that it's putting ideas together,
it's associating and creating these sort of moments of what
we call in our book integration integrative creativity. And the
richer we can fertilize the soil of that default network
(03:27):
with thinking broadly, with new experiences, with curiosity leading us
around unpredictable corners, the more surprising those associations can be,
and therefore the more creative. So that's some of what
I think I naturally do and understanding the science has
helped me make sense of why that's useful.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What else do you do, particularly when you've got a
really tight timeline, as is often the case with work projects,
what you need to think creatively, have the kind of
different ways of flipping that creative each on the daring
tych lung.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, So I love to source ideas from lots of
different people. So I have people I'll go to in
my network who again might be very directly related or
maybe tangentially related, or maybe it's just like a very
close friend that I know will always take my call
and talk to me about something. And as we do that,
we're now opening up think about the network and how
(04:23):
it's exponentially growing with every person that we talk to
in the nodes they're able to access. So now the
surface area of those ideas has just grown so much
so quickly. Through that, one of the ideas we plant
for leaders in the book is can you bring into
a brainstorm with your team someone who's a really divergent,
(04:43):
out of the box thinker in general, just someone who
can push, even in a time limited way, they can
really push the ceiling of what's an acceptable level of divergence.
For the people in the room, to get them to
go a little more out of their comfort zone, get
a little bit bolder with their ideas. Those are often
the kinds of people I might reach out to and
just get them thinking about things. And look, people like puzzles.
(05:06):
We like to solve puzzle. So if you can position
your creative challenge as a puzzle, people want to get
engaged and think about it, and they might email you
two weeks later with a new ideas a Gabrielle.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's something that I often do when I'm trying to
think creatively is I will just take myself away from
my computer screen, which is generally where I'm trying to
type my ideas into, and I will just go for
a walk and it will be a technology free walk,
just to force my brain to just be expansive and
(05:37):
you know, not constrained to just the incoming stimulus that
might be On the podcast, I'm listening to what science
is there behind that approach? And if there is science,
I'm curious, is this something you do as well?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yes, yes, and yes. So I'll start with the science
and then I'll tell you about how I do it.
So now there's three networks involved in in creativity, the
department network which I mentioned this daydreaming network, the executive
control network, which is the network that's sort of I
tell you to remember the name of the street you
grew up on. That's the one that helps you do that.
And then we have the salience network, which is sort
(06:09):
of like when you hear a siren in the background.
It's the one that gets you to pay attention that
it draws your attention from one thing to another. So
we think that the way this works is something like
the following. You get a creative challenge at work, you
start working on it with the executive control network with
your team, put it aside, you go out and you
grab your lunch. Now your daydreaming network's working on it.
Even when you're not consciously trying to. You might have
(06:31):
a surprising association that comes up that's actually quite useful.
Your salience network picks it up, says, ah aha, there's
an important idea here. Let's pay attention. And it brings
it back to the executive control network. When we are
too digitally connected and we're checking our email and we're
on messengers and we're checking the news, we're staying in
(06:53):
the executive control network. We're not letting ourselves get into
the default mode network where that daydreaming happens. The richest
daydreaming happens when we're on autopilot. As an executive control network,
we are active, so we're not just lying and staring
at the ceiling, but we're not using our kind of
working memory. We're not paying close attention to something, so
(07:15):
you can have what you just describe, that beautiful sense
of daydreaming and kind of flow my whole life, I
have practiced observing a twenty four hour technology sabbath, from
sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday. We do
that in my family. It's I think, been really helpful
in creating a less dependency on devices. But for sure,
(07:38):
the richness of the thinking and the ideas that happen
when you can unplug from devices is really powerful. And
you know, it's one of the many ways in which
these devices are changing the ways we function as human
beings in a way that is not how we evolved,
and it's in some ways depriving us of some of
these really rich, meaningful, beautiful experiences that just got interrupted
(08:01):
by the constant busyness of the divisis.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Trying a digital sabbath is something I've experimented with, and
I don't do it for a twenty four hour period,
but on the times where I've done it for several hours,
it's quite amazing just how your brain opens up in
ways that just don't seem possible when you're connected, particularly
to your phone. You know, so much of the day.
Something I would love to delve into is around purpose
(08:30):
and meaning and mattering. And I found this such an
interesting part of tomorrow Mind because I feel like most
companies talk a lot about purpose these days. But then
I loved the things that you said around meaning and mattering.
So to start, can you just share what those three
concepts are, and then we might delve deeper into them.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So meaning is what my coatho Marty Salomon calls a
flabby concept.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
There's a lot of different meanings to the word meaning.
The psychologist Michael Steger has this definition that there's three
different components to meaning. There's purpose, there's coherence, and there's significance.
So significance is that my life has meaning. There's some
significance to me being here. Coherence is this idea that
(09:23):
there's a greater integrity of my actions with something larger
that it all somehow fits together. And purpose is that
there's something bigger than I'm kind of working toward and
pushing for. Mattering is what we think of as like
a very bare minimum level of significance, whereby I feel
that the labor I'm putting out there in the world
(09:44):
is for a purpose. It's seen and it's not fornt
and at a clinical psychological level. And people lose a
sense of mattering, they can't even get out of bed
to start the day, right, So the extreme end of
not mattering is depression in the workplace. Some of our professions,
some of our labors are meaningful in a colloquial sense
(10:06):
of they might be attached to, let's say, as a
healthcare provider saving a person's life, and some of us
are doing labors that feel much more removed from immediate
meaningful impact for other human beings, for sense of integrity,
for service to the planet. As managers, whatever we're asking
people to do, we need them to be able to
(10:27):
feel that their labors have registered to us, that they matter,
that we see them doing that thing that is the
bare minimum of a person continuing to be motivated, to
keep putting in the effort day after day. And in
this day and age when we are as managers are
very often asking people, Hey, that thing that you work
(10:48):
so hard on for six months, remember that, stop doing
that thing and start doing this totally different thing because
the industry change, the world changed, what the market change,
whatever it was. That's a crisis of mattering. That's a
crisis where the employee is asked themselves, why did I
just do that for six months? And why is it
going to matter for me to do this next thing?
(11:10):
So that's where we define the sort of bare minimum
of what a manager needs to do to help people
stay motivated, and really what we owe people if we're
asking them to work on something, we owe it to
them to witness that work and to have it be
seen and to have them feel that that was not
all for not How.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Do you approach that as a later in terms of
remembering that, Because there's so much to remember and to
do to be a great leader these days, I feel
like their responsibilities are greater than ever. It seems very basic,
but I can imagine that a lot of ladies don't
do it. How do you think about it in your role.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, by the way, I think about it all the
time and every time I share this insight and this
idea of as managers, when we ask people to pivot,
I think about at that exact moment, where am I
asking my team to pivot and where do I need
to remind to go back and do this. So I
do try to pay attention to it most at these
pivot moments. I try to pay attention to it. When
(12:07):
we are reading out on metrics and performance. You know
that's a moment where your team might miss a metric,
but it might be a for a reason that was
out of their control or despite the fact that there
was a lot of effort that was put in, And
so how do you witness the effort? How do you
witness the intent even while helping the team grow and
evolve to the next chapter. So I try to narrate
(12:30):
the utility of the effort as much as I can
when I know that we're shifting away from or trying
to learn something about where it could be better, because
I know that's when it's the threat happens. And then
in general, when we have good hygiene and good practices
around recognition, which is something I think, you know, all
(12:51):
of us can get better at. But recognition is an antidote,
and it's almost a vaccine for a crisis of mattering.
If people feel your someone who's recognizing them and who's
seeing what they're doing, then they'll be more trusting about
leaving something behind and going to something.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Now, we'd love to talk about resilience because when I
was reading Tomorrow Mind, I thought, gosh, Gabriella must be
the most resilient person with everything she knows about it.
And I was really fascinated by the model that is
in the book around the five biggest drivers to resilience,
because I think that they're a little bit surprising. They're
(13:28):
different to I think what pop psychology puts out there,
and I'd love to go into some of them. And
I think, you know, for listeners that thinking, what are
these five things? So there's emotional regulation, which I would
love to start on. There's optimism, there's cognitive agility, self compassion,
and self efficacy. And I am curious because all of
those variables if you like things that we can shift
(13:51):
in ourselves as humans, which is why I love it
because it suggests that anyone can be significantly more resilient
by just practicing the right things, if you like, within
a relatively short space of time. So emotional regulation, I
feel like, even as an adult, this is something that
I struggle is particularly in times of intense stress at work,
(14:15):
and I would love to know what do you do,
What have you found works for yourself in terms of
emotional regulation.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I think for myself and for all of us, this
is an ongoing area of development that very seldom does
a human being feel they've mastered emotional regulation. And I
would say most of the time they feel that they're
not correct. So if you feel you have work to
do here, you are not alone. And it is really
a lifelong journey, and I think it's one of the
things that constitutes wisdom, and you know, something that we
(14:45):
gain their experience in learning and seeing ups and downs
and knowing that it's going to ultimately be okay. I
will tell you one of the more important learnings for
me about resilience and emotional regulation in the last five
years or so, when a number of very significant things
have happened in my life personally, is remembering knowing that
(15:07):
the people who are most resilient it's still really hard
when those things happen. Initially, that resilience doesn't mean it
doesn't feel incredibly painful and challenging, and you may cry,
and you may scream, and you may be furious, and
all of those emotions. They're big and they're negative, and
people who are resilient still have them, especially when things
(15:29):
are really hard. Where the growth comes from, and the
extreme side of resilience is this idea of post traumatic
growth or anti fragility, that we can actually grow stronger
through those experiences is how we metabolize it, how we
make meaning from it, and how we come back more
centered and grounded as a result of that. And it
(15:50):
doesn't mean that it doesn't still hurt in the moment.
So that's one thing that I use to comfort myself
around that and to give myself grace space to have
those emotions. I also do a lot for myself around time.
So the moment the news happens is incredibly painful, that
(16:11):
the hour, two hour, day afterward, But if we can
intellectually remind ourselves that even another day later, even another
three hours later, it's going to get better, it's a
source of reassurance and optimism, and it helps keep me
from kind of spinning out. There's the emotion and then
(16:32):
there's this spinning out about emotion, and so these strategies
are what helped me stay grounded in the emotion itself
rather than exacerbating it with my emotions about the emotion.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Something you write about, I think in the book or
possibly on a blog on Better app is the feelings
wheel where and I find this so helpful. I find
this particularly helpful for my ten year old daughter as well,
where just the act of actually naming what feeling I
am experiencing actually helps to kind of tull that experience,
(17:08):
which is quite helpful when you're experiencing an intense negative emotion.
Is that something that you have used yourself? I do.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
I particularly use it with negative emotion, you know, And
I'm trying to disentangle hurt from anger from fear. And
you know, the reason we think this works so well
is that that disentangling it's an intellectual exercise. So it
takes us out of the limbic system and kind of
into the forebrain. It distances us, as you said, dulls
(17:36):
a little bit from the emotion. And I do find
it effective. And I also again like this you know, painfully,
hopelessly curious person. I just start to get really curious
about that, and why did I feel that emotion and
not that emotion? And why do I tend to feel
that type of emotion and not that emotion when another
person might feel differently. So I try to use it
(17:58):
as a tool for curiosity and shifting into a slightly
more intellectual mindset.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And what I'll do I'll put a link to the
feelings will in the show notes. It's quite an amazing,
quite beautiful looking wheel that really at leasts I don't know,
it must be like seventy or eighty emotional labels, and
it helps when you're feeling a bit confused about exactly
what you're feeling to help identify that. So I'll link
to that in the show notes. Now, something that did
(18:27):
surprise me that, but I guess when I thought about it,
of course it makes sense. Is the impact of optimism
on feeling resilient. I would love to know how do
you foster optimism in yourself?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, the research on it is so profound. It is
something for those who are less familiar that people who
are more optimistic live longer, people are more optimistic recover
from cancer and cardiac disease more efficiently and effectively in
our lower risk for cardiac disease. That it could be
such a powerful signal of physical health made it even
(19:04):
intellectually of interest to me. So that was how I
first got to the conviction that I wanted to work
on optimism, and then as I took it forward to
bring the practice into my own life, I looked for
windows where I had an optimistic thought that I then
shut down, and I tried to notice when I was
(19:25):
doing that and why. For me, what I discovered is
it's not that I don't have the optimism. I'm just
overwhelming the optimism with paranoia and negativity that was not
serving me well, at least in certain key situations.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
We will be back with Gabriella soon. When we written,
we'll be discussing what cognitive agilities and how you can
develop it, as well as how to get better at prospection,
which Gabriella believes is one of the most important leadership
skills for the future. Looking for more tips to improve
(20:01):
the way you work can live. I write a short
weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped
me personally you can sign up for that at Amantha
dot com. That's Amantha dot com. I'd love to know
about cognitive agility, which again I read that and I thought,
(20:25):
really can you change that? So tell me about cognitive
agility and what that means and what are some strategies
you've used to improve that in yourself.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So we talk about cognitive agility as the ability to
go back and forth between the forest level view and
the trees level of view. The forest level view is
where we're scoping out opportunity and we're attuned to signals
in the environment that are helping us figure out what
to do. And then the trees level of view as
we've decided what to do. Now we're executing in that
(20:57):
plan and we're very heads down and focused, and we
need to be able to do both of those things.
But cognitive agility is about switching channels back and forth
between the two. That is what we find to be
this incredible differentiator in terms of resilience, because when we're
in a tight spot, we need to be able to
(21:18):
have focused effort to get out of that spot. But
we can't get stuck in one approach, especially if it's
not working or if the context around us is changing.
There's a lot of interesting military research on this because
you can imagine in modern warfare you have to be
attuned to the signals around you have to change strategy
(21:38):
is often, but you also have to be able to
just grit and push and push and push in the
trees level view of a given effort. So that's what
that means and how it's connected to resilience. So I
think that I am someone who if there are people
who have a tendency to get stuck in the forest
(22:01):
view and then their people get to have a tendency
get stuck in the tree's view, I think, if anything,
I'm someone who has a tendency to get stuck in
the trees view. So I come to conviction about here's
how we should do something, and then you know, I
want to see it through. And one of the skills
that I work on and that I help others work
(22:22):
on as well, is when do you know you need
to check yourself and come back up for air to
look around. I do that, you know, with my teams,
at least on a quarterly basis. But I think the
other thing that really just naturally is a useful force
function for me, given that tendency is a lot of
the work I do is very cross functional, and it's
(22:46):
more common than not that my cross functional peers will
have ecosystem signals that they want me to pay attention
to that might mean we need to change tack. And
so as long as I'm keeping in close conversation with
those peers who have their ears out, their sort of
scouts in the environment for things I'm not seeing, I
find it's a really helpful checkpoint for me to make
(23:08):
sure I'm coming up to scan the forest, if nothing else,
for the purpose of those conversations where we're kind of
realigning our strategy.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
And so you mentioned that you'll meet with your team quarterly,
and I guess it's distinct from doing an annual planning process.
Does that mean that you're potentially making quite big changes
every quarter as opposed to perhaps every year.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, new pieces come in, and we actually review
our metrics monthly in a semi formal way, but they're
sort of like a halfway through the court, let's see
how we're doing against these top line metrics. And then
in addition to that, there's again these signals that come in,
whether it's a major change in the market, whether it's
(23:51):
a new acquisition coming in that we need to absorb
and figure out where to work that into the efforts
and the resource allocation. So those things are always it
always creates sort of fair game to reevaluate everything, and
I say to my team maybe more often than I should.
I'm still not sure the right frequency to voice this
(24:12):
of like, good job, we got our road map set.
Remember this is going to change, you know, because I'm
trying to just say, like, we did a great thing,
we did the work we're supposed to do, and be
ready for this to change again. I'm actually trying to
get ahead of that mattering crisis that we talked about
and just to prepare that this is all. The change
(24:33):
is a huge part of the work and the job
to be done.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I find that so interesting because as a LADA, people
are looking to you for a clear direction and then
if that changes, that can impact people's trust in you
as a LADA. So how do you create that balance?
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Actually have a whole talk on this topic because I
feel like prospection, which is why one of the topics
in our book, our ability to see and plan for
the future is an essential part of what builds people's
cognitive trust in leaders today. So the sort of affective
emotional side of trust is more about do we think
(25:13):
our leaders benevolent? Are they kind? Do they take care
of us? But the cognitive side is really we're judging
someone's competence, and in this day and age where we
feel so much uncertainty, we feel like we can't see
what's ahead, we are looking to our leaders to be
the person who can. And that doesn't mean we expect
them to be fortune tellers, but we expect them to
be spending a lot, a lot a lot of time
(25:35):
thinking about the future, planning for scenarios, allocating resources today
to set us up as best as possible against those
future scenarios. We don't expect them to be superhumans, but
we do expect them to put a lot of effort
into that. And where I think leaders often fall short
today in a way that does breach trust is with
(25:57):
the statement, well, there's no way to know. We just
can't know, So we'll tell you when we know what's
going to happen, but we just don't know. What people
need to hear is here's what we know, Here's what
we don't know. Here's the scenarios that we foresee on
the basis of that, here's the actions that we're taking right, detailed,
fleshed out plans that reflect a lot of time and
planning gives the reassurance even in an environment where everyone
(26:22):
accepts that a lot of those plans will go by
the wayside, that's still the job to be done. It's
part of what we need to feel comfort that our
leaders are taking on as the burden of leading us
in this sort of foggy uncertainty.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
How can we build out prospection skills? Because there is
something that you write about in the book, and there
was one exercise that I did particularly like, But maybe
I'll ask about that in the moment. I want to
know what are you doing that's helping you.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, So perspection happens in two phases. The first phase
is very fast and optimistic. We think really divergently. So
if I said to you, think about where you might
be in your career and ten years is right, it
might be big and all kinds of grand things might
come to mind. And then reality sets in. Here's where
(27:08):
we sort of shut down. I find I shut down
my own optimism. I get too pessimistic, realistic, and then
over the course of much longer period of time, we
now start planning. So our colleague, the psychologist Roy Baumeister,
calls this dream big and get real, and each of
us goes through those phases, whether we realize it or not.
(27:29):
We need to be good at both of those things.
When we study leaders who are really good at prospection,
they actually spend a lot of time in the get
real phase. In the planning phase, again, it's scenarios. It's
what are all the ways this could play out? How
are we going to allocate resources? When are we going
to come back up to the forest level and reevaluate
all of those things. There is such a thing as
(27:51):
planning fatigue, just like there's decision fatigue. Getting better at
prospection is expanding our capacity for planning. And when it
all goes out the wind, we do more planning and
then we guess what we wake up and we do
still more planning. And so for me, it's really pushing
myself to have more and more capacity for that. When
it's not always the fun thing, it's not always the
(28:13):
thing I want to do, it's not always something that
feels gratifying, but I know that it's a huge part
of my role, and if I'm not doing it, no
one else is going to take the time to do
that for my team.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So I want to ask about the new doors opening
exercise which he wrote about in Tomorrow Mind. And in
this particular experiment, the researchers gave people some instructions and
they were asked to do this once per week for
a month, where the instructures read. After difficult experiences, many
people feel a sense of loss. It feels that certain
(28:46):
opportunities or doors have closed in their life. Sometimes people
find that new doors open and new opportunities present themselves,
and these new opportunities could be almost anything. The existence
of new opportunities does not mean that losses are unimportant
and less painful. Important losses can exist alongside some potentially
important new opportunities. We would like to know if you've
noticed any new doors opening in your own life in
(29:08):
the past six months. For the next fifteen minutes, please
write down whatever comes to mind about these new opportunities
or new doors. So people did that once a week
for a month, and it yielded some really impressive results.
I'm curious to know your thoughts on that study, and
maybe if that's an exercise that you have used yourself
or with your teams or customers.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, it's a beautiful study illustrating the ways that we
tell ourselves stories about what happened and why how it
has such a profound influence on our psychological well being,
our ability to recover, ability to move forward. That was
really a study of post traumatic growth or what I
called earlier anti fragility. So how can we go through
(29:49):
something that is challenging and difficult, but within days, weeks, months,
on the other end, we're actually more centered and more
grounded and taking the time to think abou about what
were the opportunities that were positive from my life that
came in the aftermath of this hard, hard thing, and
(30:10):
really reframe the way we think about going through those
challenges to begin with. There's also a really lovely book
called Redirect by Tim Wilson, a psychologist that talks about
the broader project of how we can retell our own
life stories in service of these different outcomes. And we're
(30:31):
narrative creatures if we understand the mechanics of it. The
way is that stories don't naturally form, We create them,
whether we're intending to or not. We can then start
to be much more intentional about how we tell ourselves
the stories we do.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
How do you use that in your own life? When
you can hear a story going on in your mind.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I try not to tell myself a story until I'm ready,
So I try to actually just notice, observe, pick up signals, learn,
and the story I find does emerge through that process
organically as I'm finding the right versus the wrong next step.
But I think that one of the mistakes that I
(31:13):
made when I was younger, and one of the mistakes
I'm still learning not to make, is to come to
that story too early, and to feel pushed to come
to that story too early before I have discovered the
wisdom to be gained from a situation.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
What great advice to end on, Gabriella. I have loved
this chat. I find it such a joy when I
read a book that I love, and I got to
say Tomorrow Mind is one of the best books that
I've read this year. I just loved it. And so
it's been such a treat to have you on the
show and to pick your brain about certain things. So
thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you
so much for doing the work that you do and
helping so many people, and your very kind words.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
I hope you loved this chat with Gabrielle as much
as I did. I know most of us recognize the
importance of praising those we lead, but maybe taking the
next step of using effective praise to give others a
sense of purpose and meaning could be what it takes
to get things to the next level for you. If
you want to learn more about Gabriella, I highly recommend
(32:20):
her book Tomorrow Mind. It was so so good, and
we'll put a link for that in our show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warrangery people, part of the cool And Nation.
How I Work is having a little breakover Easter, so
I have hand picked one of my favorite episodes to
play for you today and I will be back with
new interviews from Thursday May one. When it comes to
your work, do you have a sense of purpose and
meaning that you can turn back to when things are hard?
(00:21):
And how about your team? How connected are they to
why their work matters? Doctor Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is an author,
a Harvard trained physician, and the chief innovation officer at
Better Up, and she thinks about these questions a lot.
Her research with Professor Martin Seligman on Thriving in Times
of uncertainty provides some really interesting insights into how we
(00:44):
can keep thriving at work even when things are tough.
In this episode, Gabriella shares why it is so important
that you ensure your team has a sense of meaning,
the five biggest drivers of resilience and they're probably not
what you think they are, and why prospection is one
of the most important leadership skills for the future. Welcome
(01:13):
to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and
strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha
imber with her work it better up Ensuring quick, effective
ways to come up with the most creative solutions is
an essential part of Gabriella's day to day, so I
wanted to find out what some of her go to
(01:33):
rituals and habits are when she needs to be thinking creatively.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So one of the strongest findings in creativity research around
individual differences is this personality tape. That's openness to experience.
So people who sort of wander around feeling wide eyed
about the world, and I feel very blessed that I
have that personality tape. My father's a great exact sample
of that to me. He wanders around the world noticing
(02:03):
things and asking questions, and he can have a conversation
with anyone and feel genuinely curious and like you really
learn something new. And I do feel that way a
lot of the time. I don't take it for granted.
And as I've learned more about how to help people
become more creative, a lot of it is how do
you grow more into embracing some of the practices that
(02:24):
constitute openness to experience. When I'm trying to be really
deliberate about this, if I'm starting on a new topic
in a new area I want to learn more about.
I try to read broadly about it, so I will
try to get, you know, the canonical books and textbooks,
but then also try to reach back into my own
(02:45):
memory bank of things that might be tangentially related. They
may not themselves end up being useful, but they might
be a bridge to something else that's useful, or they
might just sort of awaken a part of my brain
that wasn't paying attention to the topic that now can
be engaged and connecting. And when we think about the
default mode network, which is this daydreaming network, it's where
(03:07):
all these rich ideas about creativity come from, somewhat non
consciously and spontaneously. We know that it's putting ideas together,
it's associating and creating these sort of moments of what
we call in our book integration integrative creativity. And the
richer we can fertilize the soil of that default network
(03:27):
with thinking broadly, with new experiences, with curiosity leading us
around unpredictable corners, the more surprising those associations can be,
and therefore the more creative. So that's some of what
I think I naturally do and understanding the science has
helped me make sense of why that's useful.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What else do you do, particularly when you've got a
really tight timeline, as is often the case with work projects,
what you need to think creatively, have the kind of
different ways of flipping that creative each on the daring
tych lung.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, So I love to source ideas from lots of
different people. So I have people I'll go to in
my network who again might be very directly related or
maybe tangentially related, or maybe it's just like a very
close friend that I know will always take my call
and talk to me about something. And as we do that,
we're now opening up think about the network and how
(04:23):
it's exponentially growing with every person that we talk to
in the nodes they're able to access. So now the
surface area of those ideas has just grown so much
so quickly. Through that, one of the ideas we plant
for leaders in the book is can you bring into
a brainstorm with your team someone who's a really divergent,
(04:43):
out of the box thinker in general, just someone who
can push, even in a time limited way, they can
really push the ceiling of what's an acceptable level of divergence.
For the people in the room, to get them to
go a little more out of their comfort zone, get
a little bit bolder with their ideas. Those are often
the kinds of people I might reach out to and
just get them thinking about things. And look, people like puzzles.
(05:06):
We like to solve puzzle. So if you can position
your creative challenge as a puzzle, people want to get
engaged and think about it, and they might email you
two weeks later with a new ideas a Gabrielle.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's something that I often do when I'm trying to
think creatively is I will just take myself away from
my computer screen, which is generally where I'm trying to
type my ideas into, and I will just go for
a walk and it will be a technology free walk,
just to force my brain to just be expansive and
(05:37):
you know, not constrained to just the incoming stimulus that
might be On the podcast, I'm listening to what science
is there behind that approach? And if there is science,
I'm curious, is this something you do as well?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yes, yes, and yes. So I'll start with the science
and then I'll tell you about how I do it.
So now there's three networks involved in in creativity, the
department network which I mentioned this daydreaming network, the executive
control network, which is the network that's sort of I
tell you to remember the name of the street you
grew up on. That's the one that helps you do that.
And then we have the salience network, which is sort
(06:09):
of like when you hear a siren in the background.
It's the one that gets you to pay attention that
it draws your attention from one thing to another. So
we think that the way this works is something like
the following. You get a creative challenge at work, you
start working on it with the executive control network with
your team, put it aside, you go out and you
grab your lunch. Now your daydreaming network's working on it.
Even when you're not consciously trying to. You might have
(06:31):
a surprising association that comes up that's actually quite useful.
Your salience network picks it up, says, ah aha, there's
an important idea here. Let's pay attention. And it brings
it back to the executive control network. When we are
too digitally connected and we're checking our email and we're
on messengers and we're checking the news, we're staying in
(06:53):
the executive control network. We're not letting ourselves get into
the default mode network where that daydreaming happens. The richest
daydreaming happens when we're on autopilot. As an executive control network,
we are active, so we're not just lying and staring
at the ceiling, but we're not using our kind of
working memory. We're not paying close attention to something, so
(07:15):
you can have what you just describe, that beautiful sense
of daydreaming and kind of flow my whole life, I
have practiced observing a twenty four hour technology sabbath, from
sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday. We do
that in my family. It's I think, been really helpful
in creating a less dependency on devices. But for sure,
(07:38):
the richness of the thinking and the ideas that happen
when you can unplug from devices is really powerful. And
you know, it's one of the many ways in which
these devices are changing the ways we function as human
beings in a way that is not how we evolved,
and it's in some ways depriving us of some of
these really rich, meaningful, beautiful experiences that just got interrupted
(08:01):
by the constant busyness of the divisis.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Trying a digital sabbath is something I've experimented with, and
I don't do it for a twenty four hour period,
but on the times where I've done it for several hours,
it's quite amazing just how your brain opens up in
ways that just don't seem possible when you're connected, particularly
to your phone. You know, so much of the day.
Something I would love to delve into is around purpose
(08:30):
and meaning and mattering. And I found this such an
interesting part of tomorrow Mind because I feel like most
companies talk a lot about purpose these days. But then
I loved the things that you said around meaning and mattering.
So to start, can you just share what those three
concepts are, and then we might delve deeper into them.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So meaning is what my coatho Marty Salomon calls a
flabby concept.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
There's a lot of different meanings to the word meaning.
The psychologist Michael Steger has this definition that there's three
different components to meaning. There's purpose, there's coherence, and there's significance.
So significance is that my life has meaning. There's some
significance to me being here. Coherence is this idea that
(09:23):
there's a greater integrity of my actions with something larger
that it all somehow fits together. And purpose is that
there's something bigger than I'm kind of working toward and
pushing for. Mattering is what we think of as like
a very bare minimum level of significance, whereby I feel
that the labor I'm putting out there in the world
(09:44):
is for a purpose. It's seen and it's not fornt
and at a clinical psychological level. And people lose a
sense of mattering, they can't even get out of bed
to start the day, right, So the extreme end of
not mattering is depression in the workplace. Some of our professions,
some of our labors are meaningful in a colloquial sense
(10:06):
of they might be attached to, let's say, as a
healthcare provider saving a person's life, and some of us
are doing labors that feel much more removed from immediate
meaningful impact for other human beings, for sense of integrity,
for service to the planet. As managers, whatever we're asking
people to do, we need them to be able to
(10:27):
feel that their labors have registered to us, that they matter,
that we see them doing that thing that is the
bare minimum of a person continuing to be motivated, to
keep putting in the effort day after day. And in
this day and age when we are as managers are
very often asking people, Hey, that thing that you work
(10:48):
so hard on for six months, remember that, stop doing
that thing and start doing this totally different thing because
the industry change, the world changed, what the market change,
whatever it was. That's a crisis of mattering. That's a
crisis where the employee is asked themselves, why did I
just do that for six months? And why is it
going to matter for me to do this next thing?
(11:10):
So that's where we define the sort of bare minimum
of what a manager needs to do to help people
stay motivated, and really what we owe people if we're
asking them to work on something, we owe it to
them to witness that work and to have it be
seen and to have them feel that that was not
all for not How.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Do you approach that as a later in terms of
remembering that, Because there's so much to remember and to
do to be a great leader these days, I feel
like their responsibilities are greater than ever. It seems very basic,
but I can imagine that a lot of ladies don't
do it. How do you think about it in your role.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, by the way, I think about it all the
time and every time I share this insight and this
idea of as managers, when we ask people to pivot,
I think about at that exact moment, where am I
asking my team to pivot and where do I need
to remind to go back and do this. So I
do try to pay attention to it most at these
pivot moments. I try to pay attention to it. When
(12:07):
we are reading out on metrics and performance. You know
that's a moment where your team might miss a metric,
but it might be a for a reason that was
out of their control or despite the fact that there
was a lot of effort that was put in, And
so how do you witness the effort? How do you
witness the intent even while helping the team grow and
evolve to the next chapter. So I try to narrate
(12:30):
the utility of the effort as much as I can
when I know that we're shifting away from or trying
to learn something about where it could be better, because
I know that's when it's the threat happens. And then
in general, when we have good hygiene and good practices
around recognition, which is something I think, you know, all
(12:51):
of us can get better at. But recognition is an antidote,
and it's almost a vaccine for a crisis of mattering.
If people feel your someone who's recognizing them and who's
seeing what they're doing, then they'll be more trusting about
leaving something behind and going to something.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Now, we'd love to talk about resilience because when I
was reading Tomorrow Mind, I thought, gosh, Gabriella must be
the most resilient person with everything she knows about it.
And I was really fascinated by the model that is
in the book around the five biggest drivers to resilience,
because I think that they're a little bit surprising. They're
(13:28):
different to I think what pop psychology puts out there,
and I'd love to go into some of them. And
I think, you know, for listeners that thinking, what are
these five things? So there's emotional regulation, which I would
love to start on. There's optimism, there's cognitive agility, self compassion,
and self efficacy. And I am curious because all of
those variables if you like things that we can shift
(13:51):
in ourselves as humans, which is why I love it
because it suggests that anyone can be significantly more resilient
by just practicing the right things, if you like, within
a relatively short space of time. So emotional regulation, I
feel like, even as an adult, this is something that
I struggle is particularly in times of intense stress at work,
(14:15):
and I would love to know what do you do,
What have you found works for yourself in terms of
emotional regulation.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
I think for myself and for all of us, this
is an ongoing area of development that very seldom does
a human being feel they've mastered emotional regulation. And I
would say most of the time they feel that they're
not correct. So if you feel you have work to
do here, you are not alone. And it is really
a lifelong journey, and I think it's one of the
things that constitutes wisdom, and you know, something that we
(14:45):
gain their experience in learning and seeing ups and downs
and knowing that it's going to ultimately be okay. I
will tell you one of the more important learnings for
me about resilience and emotional regulation in the last five
years or so, when a number of very significant things
have happened in my life personally, is remembering knowing that
(15:07):
the people who are most resilient it's still really hard
when those things happen. Initially, that resilience doesn't mean it
doesn't feel incredibly painful and challenging, and you may cry,
and you may scream, and you may be furious, and
all of those emotions. They're big and they're negative, and
people who are resilient still have them, especially when things
(15:29):
are really hard. Where the growth comes from, and the
extreme side of resilience is this idea of post traumatic
growth or anti fragility, that we can actually grow stronger
through those experiences is how we metabolize it, how we
make meaning from it, and how we come back more
centered and grounded as a result of that. And it
(15:50):
doesn't mean that it doesn't still hurt in the moment.
So that's one thing that I use to comfort myself
around that and to give myself grace space to have
those emotions. I also do a lot for myself around time.
So the moment the news happens is incredibly painful, that
(16:11):
the hour, two hour, day afterward, But if we can
intellectually remind ourselves that even another day later, even another
three hours later, it's going to get better, it's a
source of reassurance and optimism, and it helps keep me
from kind of spinning out. There's the emotion and then
(16:32):
there's this spinning out about emotion, and so these strategies
are what helped me stay grounded in the emotion itself
rather than exacerbating it with my emotions about the emotion.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Something you write about, I think in the book or
possibly on a blog on Better app is the feelings
wheel where and I find this so helpful. I find
this particularly helpful for my ten year old daughter as well,
where just the act of actually naming what feeling I
am experiencing actually helps to kind of tull that experience,
(17:08):
which is quite helpful when you're experiencing an intense negative emotion.
Is that something that you have used yourself? I do.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
I particularly use it with negative emotion, you know, And
I'm trying to disentangle hurt from anger from fear. And
you know, the reason we think this works so well
is that that disentangling it's an intellectual exercise. So it
takes us out of the limbic system and kind of
into the forebrain. It distances us, as you said, dulls
(17:36):
a little bit from the emotion. And I do find
it effective. And I also again like this you know, painfully,
hopelessly curious person. I just start to get really curious
about that, and why did I feel that emotion and
not that emotion? And why do I tend to feel
that type of emotion and not that emotion when another
person might feel differently. So I try to use it
(17:58):
as a tool for curiosity and shifting into a slightly
more intellectual mindset.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
And what I'll do I'll put a link to the
feelings will in the show notes. It's quite an amazing,
quite beautiful looking wheel that really at leasts I don't know,
it must be like seventy or eighty emotional labels, and
it helps when you're feeling a bit confused about exactly
what you're feeling to help identify that. So I'll link
to that in the show notes. Now, something that did
(18:27):
surprise me that, but I guess when I thought about it,
of course it makes sense. Is the impact of optimism
on feeling resilient. I would love to know how do
you foster optimism in yourself?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, the research on it is so profound. It is
something for those who are less familiar that people who
are more optimistic live longer, people are more optimistic recover
from cancer and cardiac disease more efficiently and effectively in
our lower risk for cardiac disease. That it could be
such a powerful signal of physical health made it even
(19:04):
intellectually of interest to me. So that was how I
first got to the conviction that I wanted to work
on optimism, and then as I took it forward to
bring the practice into my own life, I looked for
windows where I had an optimistic thought that I then
shut down, and I tried to notice when I was
(19:25):
doing that and why. For me, what I discovered is
it's not that I don't have the optimism. I'm just
overwhelming the optimism with paranoia and negativity that was not
serving me well, at least in certain key situations.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
We will be back with Gabriella soon. When we written,
we'll be discussing what cognitive agilities and how you can
develop it, as well as how to get better at prospection,
which Gabriella believes is one of the most important leadership
skills for the future. Looking for more tips to improve
(20:01):
the way you work can live. I write a short
weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped
me personally you can sign up for that at Amantha
dot com. That's Amantha dot com. I'd love to know
about cognitive agility, which again I read that and I thought,
(20:25):
really can you change that? So tell me about cognitive
agility and what that means and what are some strategies
you've used to improve that in yourself.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So we talk about cognitive agility as the ability to
go back and forth between the forest level view and
the trees level of view. The forest level view is
where we're scoping out opportunity and we're attuned to signals
in the environment that are helping us figure out what
to do. And then the trees level of view as
we've decided what to do. Now we're executing in that
(20:57):
plan and we're very heads down and focused, and we
need to be able to do both of those things.
But cognitive agility is about switching channels back and forth
between the two. That is what we find to be
this incredible differentiator in terms of resilience, because when we're
in a tight spot, we need to be able to
(21:18):
have focused effort to get out of that spot. But
we can't get stuck in one approach, especially if it's
not working or if the context around us is changing.
There's a lot of interesting military research on this because
you can imagine in modern warfare you have to be
attuned to the signals around you have to change strategy
(21:38):
is often, but you also have to be able to
just grit and push and push and push in the
trees level view of a given effort. So that's what
that means and how it's connected to resilience. So I
think that I am someone who if there are people
who have a tendency to get stuck in the forest
(22:01):
view and then their people get to have a tendency
get stuck in the tree's view, I think, if anything,
I'm someone who has a tendency to get stuck in
the trees view. So I come to conviction about here's
how we should do something, and then you know, I
want to see it through. And one of the skills
that I work on and that I help others work
(22:22):
on as well, is when do you know you need
to check yourself and come back up for air to
look around. I do that, you know, with my teams,
at least on a quarterly basis. But I think the
other thing that really just naturally is a useful force
function for me, given that tendency is a lot of
the work I do is very cross functional, and it's
(22:46):
more common than not that my cross functional peers will
have ecosystem signals that they want me to pay attention
to that might mean we need to change tack. And
so as long as I'm keeping in close conversation with
those peers who have their ears out, their sort of
scouts in the environment for things I'm not seeing, I
find it's a really helpful checkpoint for me to make
(23:08):
sure I'm coming up to scan the forest, if nothing else,
for the purpose of those conversations where we're kind of
realigning our strategy.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
And so you mentioned that you'll meet with your team quarterly,
and I guess it's distinct from doing an annual planning process.
Does that mean that you're potentially making quite big changes
every quarter as opposed to perhaps every year.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, new pieces come in, and we actually review
our metrics monthly in a semi formal way, but they're
sort of like a halfway through the court, let's see
how we're doing against these top line metrics. And then
in addition to that, there's again these signals that come in,
whether it's a major change in the market, whether it's
(23:51):
a new acquisition coming in that we need to absorb
and figure out where to work that into the efforts
and the resource allocation. So those things are always it
always creates sort of fair game to reevaluate everything, and
I say to my team maybe more often than I should.
I'm still not sure the right frequency to voice this
(24:12):
of like, good job, we got our road map set.
Remember this is going to change, you know, because I'm
trying to just say, like, we did a great thing,
we did the work we're supposed to do, and be
ready for this to change again. I'm actually trying to
get ahead of that mattering crisis that we talked about
and just to prepare that this is all. The change
(24:33):
is a huge part of the work and the job
to be done.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I find that so interesting because as a LADA, people
are looking to you for a clear direction and then
if that changes, that can impact people's trust in you
as a LADA. So how do you create that balance?
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Actually have a whole talk on this topic because I
feel like prospection, which is why one of the topics
in our book, our ability to see and plan for
the future is an essential part of what builds people's
cognitive trust in leaders today. So the sort of affective
emotional side of trust is more about do we think
(25:13):
our leaders benevolent? Are they kind? Do they take care
of us? But the cognitive side is really we're judging
someone's competence, and in this day and age where we
feel so much uncertainty, we feel like we can't see
what's ahead, we are looking to our leaders to be
the person who can. And that doesn't mean we expect
them to be fortune tellers, but we expect them to
be spending a lot, a lot a lot of time
(25:35):
thinking about the future, planning for scenarios, allocating resources today
to set us up as best as possible against those
future scenarios. We don't expect them to be superhumans, but
we do expect them to put a lot of effort
into that. And where I think leaders often fall short
today in a way that does breach trust is with
(25:57):
the statement, well, there's no way to know. We just
can't know, So we'll tell you when we know what's
going to happen, but we just don't know. What people
need to hear is here's what we know, Here's what
we don't know. Here's the scenarios that we foresee on
the basis of that, here's the actions that we're taking right, detailed,
fleshed out plans that reflect a lot of time and
planning gives the reassurance even in an environment where everyone
(26:22):
accepts that a lot of those plans will go by
the wayside, that's still the job to be done. It's
part of what we need to feel comfort that our
leaders are taking on as the burden of leading us
in this sort of foggy uncertainty.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
How can we build out prospection skills? Because there is
something that you write about in the book, and there
was one exercise that I did particularly like, But maybe
I'll ask about that in the moment. I want to
know what are you doing that's helping you.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, So perspection happens in two phases. The first phase
is very fast and optimistic. We think really divergently. So
if I said to you, think about where you might
be in your career and ten years is right, it
might be big and all kinds of grand things might
come to mind. And then reality sets in. Here's where
(27:08):
we sort of shut down. I find I shut down
my own optimism. I get too pessimistic, realistic, and then
over the course of much longer period of time, we
now start planning. So our colleague, the psychologist Roy Baumeister,
calls this dream big and get real, and each of
us goes through those phases, whether we realize it or not.
(27:29):
We need to be good at both of those things.
When we study leaders who are really good at prospection,
they actually spend a lot of time in the get
real phase. In the planning phase, again, it's scenarios. It's
what are all the ways this could play out? How
are we going to allocate resources? When are we going
to come back up to the forest level and reevaluate
all of those things. There is such a thing as
(27:51):
planning fatigue, just like there's decision fatigue. Getting better at
prospection is expanding our capacity for planning. And when it
all goes out the wind, we do more planning and
then we guess what we wake up and we do
still more planning. And so for me, it's really pushing
myself to have more and more capacity for that. When
it's not always the fun thing, it's not always the
(28:13):
thing I want to do, it's not always something that
feels gratifying, but I know that it's a huge part
of my role, and if I'm not doing it, no
one else is going to take the time to do
that for my team.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So I want to ask about the new doors opening
exercise which he wrote about in Tomorrow Mind. And in
this particular experiment, the researchers gave people some instructions and
they were asked to do this once per week for
a month, where the instructures read. After difficult experiences, many
people feel a sense of loss. It feels that certain
(28:46):
opportunities or doors have closed in their life. Sometimes people
find that new doors open and new opportunities present themselves,
and these new opportunities could be almost anything. The existence
of new opportunities does not mean that losses are unimportant
and less painful. Important losses can exist alongside some potentially
important new opportunities. We would like to know if you've
noticed any new doors opening in your own life in
(29:08):
the past six months. For the next fifteen minutes, please
write down whatever comes to mind about these new opportunities
or new doors. So people did that once a week
for a month, and it yielded some really impressive results.
I'm curious to know your thoughts on that study, and
maybe if that's an exercise that you have used yourself
or with your teams or customers.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, it's a beautiful study illustrating the ways that we
tell ourselves stories about what happened and why how it
has such a profound influence on our psychological well being,
our ability to recover, ability to move forward. That was
really a study of post traumatic growth or what I
called earlier anti fragility. So how can we go through
(29:49):
something that is challenging and difficult, but within days, weeks, months,
on the other end, we're actually more centered and more
grounded and taking the time to think abou about what
were the opportunities that were positive from my life that
came in the aftermath of this hard, hard thing, and
(30:10):
really reframe the way we think about going through those
challenges to begin with. There's also a really lovely book
called Redirect by Tim Wilson, a psychologist that talks about
the broader project of how we can retell our own
life stories in service of these different outcomes. And we're
(30:31):
narrative creatures if we understand the mechanics of it. The
way is that stories don't naturally form, We create them,
whether we're intending to or not. We can then start
to be much more intentional about how we tell ourselves
the stories we do.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
How do you use that in your own life? When
you can hear a story going on in your mind.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I try not to tell myself a story until I'm ready,
So I try to actually just notice, observe, pick up signals, learn,
and the story I find does emerge through that process
organically as I'm finding the right versus the wrong next step.
But I think that one of the mistakes that I
(31:13):
made when I was younger, and one of the mistakes
I'm still learning not to make, is to come to
that story too early, and to feel pushed to come
to that story too early before I have discovered the
wisdom to be gained from a situation.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
What great advice to end on, Gabriella. I have loved
this chat. I find it such a joy when I
read a book that I love, and I got to
say Tomorrow Mind is one of the best books that
I've read this year. I just loved it. And so
it's been such a treat to have you on the
show and to pick your brain about certain things. So
thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you
so much for doing the work that you do and
helping so many people, and your very kind words.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
I hope you loved this chat with Gabrielle as much
as I did. I know most of us recognize the
importance of praising those we lead, but maybe taking the
next step of using effective praise to give others a
sense of purpose and meaning could be what it takes
to get things to the next level for you. If
you want to learn more about Gabriella, I highly recommend
(32:20):
her book Tomorrow Mind. It was so so good, and
we'll put a link for that in our show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warrangery people, part of the cool And Nation.
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