Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.
Jen Fisher (Jen): Hi WorkWell listeners. I’m really excited to share that my book Work Better Together is officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this book. It’s all about how to create a more human-centered workplace. And as we return to the office, for many of us, this book can help you move forward into post-pandemic life with strategies and tools to strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It’s available now from your favorite book retailer.
We often overlook one of the most important relationships we have in our life. The relationship with ourselves. We can be our own worst critic, but we have to remember that perfection shouldn’t be the goal. In fact, when we learn to accept our weaknesses, we can create more opportunities to grow and embrace the awesome human inside of every one of us.
This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I’m Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer for Deloitte and I’m so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being. I am here with Nataly Kogan. She’s a leading emotional fitness expert on a mission to help millions of people struggle less and thrive more in work and life. Nataly is the co-founder and CEO of Happier, a leading wellness company. She’s also a best-selling author of several books, including her latest, The Awesome Human Project: Break Free from Daily Burnout, Struggle Less, and Thrive More in Work and Life.
Nataly, welcome to the show.
Nataly Kogan (Nataly): I’m so grateful to be here again. What a treat.
Jen: I was going to say, to be back. You are actually the first WorkWell guest to be on the show twice. So, congratulations on that, but more importantly, congratulations on your new book, The Awesome Human Project.
Nataly: Thank you. Thank you. I honor, I take on the responsibility of being a two-time guest. I will do my best, and thank you.
Jen: Well, the guests loved your first episode, but let’s give our listeners, just in case they don’t remember, I mean, you’re kind of unforgettable, but let’s give them a refresher. Your personal story, how you became passionate about happiness and well-being. Take us on that journey.
Nataly: It wasn’t an expected one, as I guess. Most stories like this aren’t. I didn’t grow up thinking one day I’m going to teach people emotional fitness skills for a living. That would have been funny. I grew up actually in Russia. I came here as a refugee when I was a teenager with my parents. And I always start
my journey there, because it was such a difficult, it was a traumatic experience. And it was a dream. But it was really traumatic. I didn’t speak the language. Everything was new. My parents couldn’t really take care of me. They were trying to figure out their stuff and that experience instilled in me this idea that anything meaningful you do in life has to involve struggle. And so, for the next 20 years or so I worked really, really hard. I didn’t know the word grit at the time, but I really owned it. Like, I should have had a grit T-shirt because I just gritted my way through. I mean, everything from learning English. I went to a great college. Built a really, really successful career in venture capital and finance and technology. Started companies, was part of companies, wrote books, and it was all incredibly meaningful to me. And it felt really incredible to be able to really honor this dream, living in America and taking advantage of these opportunities, but it was all at an enormous personal cost. I was constantly exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed. I’m sure many listeners are nodding right now and my experience might have been…the facts might be different, but I think we all can relate to this. But most importantly, I assumed that was the only way, like I assumed that struggling through life and work was the only option. Because I was doing something that was meaningful. And then several years ago I hit a wall and I completely burnt out. And when I say burnout, you know, it is a term that has now become, unfortunately, very popular. I think we all experience burnout. I know we’ve gone through it in different ways. For me what it meant was, I just stopped. Like the light went out. And I stopped being able to function as a leader, as a CEO of a company called, Happier that I had founded, which is the irony there. As a mom, as a leader of a team, and it was very, very scary. I didn’t really know what to do, but I had to find a way. I didn’t want to give up initially it was for my daughter, which is why both my books are dedicated to her. And so, I went searching for, actually to be honest with you, I’m not sure what I was searching for. I was searching for any kind of help to try and figure out how I could live and work differently. And through a lot of research, and a lot of trial and error, and a lot more trial and error I found a way. I took these small steps and I learned different practices, and ultimately, if I had to summarize what I did, I for the first time in my life recognized that I’m a human being. I have feelings and emotions and needs, mental energy needs, emotional, physical, and that I needed to create a more supportive relationship with myself, my thoughts, and emotions. And that became my personal training and then eventually after several years I realized wow, this is helping me so much, I would like to offer it to others, and here we are.
Jen: Here we are and we’re grateful for you, because so many of us, including myself, do need it on a regular basis. So, let’s talk about your new book called, “The Awesome Human Project”. Tell me about the book and tell me, more importantly, what makes humans awesome, and talk about the power of connection. Because I know this is something that you and I both share and believe in.
Nataly: Yes, I actually want to start there, because I want to tell you and everyone listening that, I happen to have the honor of knowing you, but everyone listening, I don’t have to know you to be confident that you are an awesome human. And what I mean by that is something very specific, I believe we all have the capacity to do meaningful things to be a force of good in the life of others to positively impact our families, our teams, our friends, our communities. That’s the awesome part. But we’re also human, and that means that we don’t have unlimited energy. We can’t do all the things always and do them perfectly. That we need to honor our humanity and take care of ourselves, and also that we need to do some work to remove the mental blocks that hold us back. And so, we’re all awesome, and we’re all humans. So we are awesome humans. And I think it’s such an important message that I want to bring to everyone right now. I think we’re a society, we’re obviously going through a pandemic, but I think
we’re also going through a pandemic of forgetting the goodness in ourselves and each other. I think we’re in a place where endless self-criticism and criticism of everything around us has become kind of the thing. And so, a part of my raison d’etre, my bigger why for writing this book is to encourage us and give skills, because that’s how I roll, for all of us to reconnect to the awesome human in ourselves and in others. The way we treat others is rooted in how we treat ourselves. One of the big lies I told myself during the journey that I shared was that it didn’t matter how I felt. It didn’t matter that I criticized myself all the time. I cared about my teams. I cared about people in my life. And I thought I could be a great compassionate leader. And I thought, I could be a great coworker regardless of how I treated myself. But that was a really big lie. And it’s painful to say this, but what I learned after I burnt out is I brought out lack of compassion. I was impatient with people. I expected perfection from everyone around me. And I went ballistic when I didn’t get it. So the way we treat others is rooted in how we treat ourselves. And so, reconnecting to our own awesome humanness, as I call it, is also going to help us to see more of the awesome humanity in each other, and that’s the power of connection, which is something we need so much right now. One of the things I talk about in the book is, and it’s one of the core concepts and the skills that I offer is that we choose the mental lens through which we see ourselves, the world, and other people. The thoughts our brain gives us, they’re not some kind of accurate descriptions of objective reality. You get an email from a colleague and your brain is like ‘oh my god, she’s so annoying. She’s being so nasty in this email.’ Well, that’s not actually fact. That’s an interpretation. Your brain has used a lens and maybe it’s a lens this colleague had done this before and she actually was trying to be rude. Maybe it is a lens of past experience. Maybe it is a lens of the negativity bias. We all focus on what’s wrong or could be wrong much more than what’s right. But the thing is, we don’t have to go along with the lenses our brain automatically chooses. We get to choose the lens through which we see ourselves and others, and this book and the skills and practices in it is an invitation to look at ourselves and others through this lens of our awesome humanity.
Jen: I love it, but it’s hard. So talk about that, like why is it so hard?
Nataly: It is so hard because of our amazing, wonderful, and limited brain. So I just need to say this off the top and I say this with love to everyone’s brain. But your brain does not care about your happiness. It doesn’t care about your thriving. It doesn’t care about your joy. And it doesn’t care about your feelings. None of that matters.
Jen: Except keeping you alive, right?
Nataly: Exactly, your brain, exactly only one thing safety from danger. And so, your brain cares about your survival. And because of that it’s developed some of these mental lenses to ‘keep you safe.’ So I mentioned your brain has a negativity bias, danger usually comes with something negative about it. So the brain is always looking out what could be wrong? What is wrong? We remember wrong things. And that lens, by the way, the negativity bias, Jen, we also apply it to ourselves. Do we get up in the morning and go ‘oh, I’m so great. I got so much done yesterday. I look great. I’m so proud of myself.’ Maybe a few people do, I have yet to meet one. Most of us get up in the morning, it’s like ‘oh my god, I have new wrinkles. There’s too much fat around my stomach. I didn’t even finish my to do list yesterday. I was being so lazy. Oh my god.’
Jen: Are you spying on me, Nataly?
Nataly: I’m spying on myself. That’s what I’m doing. I’m spying on myself. So that negativity bias, we have to recognize the brain is also applying it to us. The other lens our brain uses is a lens of past experiences. So we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we believe they are. And so, oh my god, I can never…these things never work out for me or I suck, I suck at public speaking. I’m just terrible at public speaking. And so these are just some examples of statements that that’s your brain applying its lens of like past experience or stories that we believed about ourselves. That have come from maybe our parents or maybe past experiences or the media, whatever it is, but that’s why it’s hard. Because the brain is out there creating these stories because it really doesn’t care about anything other than keeping you safe from danger. And so it’s our work as awesome humans to practice choosing these lenses, and that’s what the book is about. It’s about strengthening, what I call, emotional fitness skills to help us do that.
Jen: Yup and I want to get into the five skills. But I want to step back first and get back to what you talked about struggle and struggle in life. And it’s in the title of your book. And challenges are constant in life, but you say struggle is optional. So tell me more about that.
Nataly: I’m officially calling BS on the very popular meme of, you know, the struggle is real. I am officially calling BS on all that you know, I spend…look I spent 15 years in my career in startups and very fast-paced companies where this was kind of the way of being. You tough it out. You hustle it out. You struggle it out. But here is the difference, challenge is what happens on the outside, and being human is hard. I think it’s one of the first…this in the introduction in my book like being human is hard. There are things coming at us all the time. I mean look, you and I are having a second conversation during the pandemic, did any of us expect that this was going to happen and all the personal challenges we’ve had to handle and professional. So challenges are part of life. I often say challenge is a feature, it’s not a bug. And there’s nothing we can do. We can’t predict when they come. We can’t prevent them. But struggle is our internal experience of the challenge. Struggle comes from the way that we react toward the challenge. The mental lens that we choose. It comes from the way we treat ourselves. So we can either treat ourselves with harshness and endless criticism or we can support ourselves through this challenge. And struggle also comes from the way that we handle our own emotions, including the difficult emotions about this challenge. And so struggle is about our internal experience, and we can reduce it. It is optional. So even when we go through really, incredibly difficult life things personally, professionally, we can choose and the way we do this is by creating this more supportive relationship with ourselves. We can choose to reduce that inner struggle.
Jen: And I feel like you and I talked about this before, you’re a big Haruki Murakami fan, right?
Nataly: Yes. Huge.
Jen: And this just really reminds me of a quote from him that, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”. So very similar. I feel like we talked about that on the first episode and now I’m going to have to go back and listen to it.
Nataly: Me too and I’m going to have to, I have a pile. Haruki Murakami is my top three, favorite authors. So now you’re inspiring me to grab a book and read some.
Jen: Let’s talk about, we’ve touched on it. The five core emotional fitness skills. Let’s dive in and you also talk about the skills for emotionally fit teams. So let’s talk about that, since this is a podcast about well-being at work, let’s talk about the individual and the teams.
Nataly: Yes, and the first thing I want to say, and I say this whenever I speak with leaders or people running companies is and they tell me okay, tell me about ways to help my team be more emotionally fit or have greater well-being. And I tell them we can’t talk about your team before we talk about you. Because just like we can’t give what we don’t have, like if we are empty on energy and exhausted, we really can’t do great work or contribute to others in a meaningful way. I tell leaders you can’t teach what you don’t practice. I as a leader tried to teach what I didn’t practice for 20 years and I saw the negative impact it had. So the five skills and again, first the lenses, it’s for you as an individual. So the five skills are, I’ll just say them and then I’ll talk a little bit about them. Acceptance, gratitude, self-care, intentional kindness and compassion, and the bigger why. And they are in order. We do have to begin with acceptance, because acceptance is the gateway skill. Acceptance is a skill of looking at whatever challenge or situation you’re dealing with clarity, which means just focusing on the facts that you know to be true and separating out those stories that your brain’s lenses have created. And then using that as your starting point to say, okay, this is how it is. This is how I feel. What is one thing I could do to move forward with less struggle. And so, acceptance is the gateway skill to get ourselves out of what I call in the book, the valley of struggle, which is the difference between how something is and how we’ve decided it should be. And so, a lot of us are in the valley of struggle now because the world is not as it should be. There’s so many challenges going on, and acceptance is a skill of just bringing your attention to what are the things I know to be true versus the stories my brain has created. And given what I know to be true and how I feel, what’s one thing I could do to move forward. And this is an incredibly powerful skill for teams as well. Research shows that leaders who are most effective at guiding their teams through crisis, which is how I define the time we’re in, they create a culture and atmosphere where people feel open about sharing their challenges, and that’s a really key part of acceptance. And so, to cultivate the culture of acceptance, first of all, the leader has to practice. So you have to actually practice this on their own, but it’s also about having these conversations with the team where everyone gets an opportunity to share how they’re feeling, but then as a leader you guide the discussion to focus on, okay, so this is challenging, here are the things we know to be true, here’s how everyone feels about it. Okay, what are some steps we could take to move forward? So it is a really, really powerful skill. It’s kind of the one I use on autopilot these days because boy there’s a lot of things the brain has decided are not how they should be. So that’s acceptance, and I say in the book, and I say this now, it’s probably the most challenging skill. So Jen, when you said, why is it so hard. It’s because our brain doesn’t want to practice acceptance. Our brain would rather keep us in the valley of struggle because that’s familiar. Those patterns are familiar, so that’s why it’s so challenging. But acceptance is a skill that can help you really dramatically reduce what I call unnecessary self-created stress. There is stress in life. Stress is natural. But our thoughts can create a lot of additional stress when we ruminate on these stories, go along with these stories. And so this is the skill to really save your energy from doing that.
The second skill is gratitude. I think it’s probably more familiar, but the way that I define gratitude is focusing in on small positive moments in your day and life as they are, including when things are challenging and being really generous with your gratitude toward other people. So research shows that when you are going through a difficult time practicing gratitude dramatically improves resilience. It reduces stress. It actually helps us sleep better. You and I were chatting about sleep before, we kicked
off. And when it comes to your team, I can’t think of a more essential skill to practice than gratitude right now. Because not only does it help shift everyone’s attention away from where the brain wants to go with its negativity bias on things that are wrong. And it reminds your brain about, yeah, sure, these things wrong, but also these things are okay or good or meaningful. But gratitude creates that really important sense of connection. Because when I share my gratitude with you, I have to be a little bit vulnerable. I have to open up. When I tell you something I’m grateful for, I have to open up. You’re learning something about me. And so, I work with a lot of teams and I offer them this little practice, this little ritual I call it gratitude meeting kickoff. So at your next meeting before we dive into the agenda, share something you’re grateful for or share your gratitude for someone in the room and then ask if anyone else wants to go. And Jen, I cannot tell you we’ve heard from so many teams that have been practicing this, where they said, oh my God, it’s not even about gratitude, we feel like we’re getting to know each other as a team. Because for us it’s a piece of us, and I’m making this motion right now like the way that I think of gratitude like weaves a thread of humanity from me to you.
Jen: I think you and I have talked about this. The thing I love about sharing gratitude with others is, there’s a dual benefit, both people get the benefit. The person that you’re sharing the gratitude toward and you. And so it’s a no brainer. It’s like why not do it, because it lifts all boats, everybody benefits from it.
Nataly: Yes, here’s an interesting bit of research that I came across when I was working on my book. I forget the exact numbers, but something like 60% of people in the workplace, employees say that they wish that their boss expressed gratitude toward them more often or just even talked about gratitude, and yet half the leaders say that they don’t do it. And I just want to comment on this, I don’t think it’s because they’re bad people. I think that it’s lack of familiarity and also I just want to say this, when I began to practice gratitude, I thought it was so weird. And I just want to say this like…
Jen: It feels very awkward.
Nataly: It’s so weird. Like for myself it felt weird. I felt like, I don’t know, it’s like really cheesy, I felt, and then to express it to others I just start also like cheesy and awkward and we all, there’s a lot of research that shows we tend to overestimate how awkward it’s going to feel, underestimate how good it’s going to make the other person feel. So I just bring up some of this research for anyone who’s listening like, well, it sounds good, but like I can’t imagine doing this in my workplace. Start small. That’s my advice. Don’t start in a meeting then. Start by saying it to another person. I often say this in my workshops on gratitude, like own the fact that it’s weird. Be like listen, this is so awkward, but I heard this lady on an interview, I read this book, and she says to do it, so I’m giving it a shot. Chances are other people feel the same and so break the ice just by owning that it’s weird. And the last thing I just want to say you never have to use the word gratitude ever. Like if that’s not your vibe, don’t use that word. I tell people why they’re awesome all the time. That’s my language, so you don’t actually have to say, “Jen, I’m grateful for you.” You can say, “hey, I really appreciate your thoughtful questions in this interview.” Or “I think it’s so awesome that you ask such thoughtful questions.” So make it your own, but when you practice it a little bit, I do promise the cheesiness, the awkwardness goes does away, because you realize how awesome it feels.
Jen: Yeah. But I love the guidance or the advice on making it your own. Because I do think that that helps. We tend to get kind of stuck on like oh, what are the exact right words that I’m supposed to say and, you know, just say it. Say what you’re thinking. Say what you’re feeling. That’s it.
Nataly: 1000%. And one last thing. Again, I keep gathering these tips because I work with so many people, and so I keep learning about the different reservations. It might be more comfortable for you if you’re just starting out to write it. So you can send an email or a slack message or a text like, of course, or even a gratitude note. In fact, writing someone a gratitude note has been shown to be one of the most meaningful ways to practice gratitude. So if it feels really awkward to say it, no worries, start by writing it down. There is no wrong way to do it, and the only two requirements are that you’re genuine about it, so we can’t fake each other out. And the second is tell the person why, so thank you is not gratitude. It’s really being polite, and that’s great. But it’s not gratitude. So tell the person why, like in my example, like Jen, it’s really awesome that you ask really thoughtful questions in a podcast interview. There it is. But that why is really important. How you do it and the words you use, that’s less important.
Jen: I’m sure you saw it, but on a blog I wrote recently about replying to all just to say thank you. It’s not an expression of gratitude. So clear all of our inboxes.
Nataly: So that’s an expression of I don’t know. That’s just an annoying thing we all must stop.
Jen: Yes, exactly. Alright, so we did 1 and 2, what’s 3, 4, and 5?
Nataly: Well, three is self-care. But I have a different definition of self-care than I think most of us are used to. And when I came up with this definition for myself, it sort of was a breakthrough in how I thought about it. So the way that I define self-care is it’s a skill of fueling your emotional, mental, and physical energy. If you think about it, like take an example of a car. A car needs gasoline or electricity, I have a gas car still, so it needs gasoline to do its job of being a car. When the car runs out of gas, you don’t sit there and go well, I don’t know if I have time to fill it up. Because then the car can’t go anywhere or you don’t sit there and go well, I don’t know, does the car deserve more gas? Has it done enough? We do none of that and yet we apply this to ourselves as well. I mean how many times do we feel really exhausted, but we don’t take a break because our to do list is not empty yet. And so, for me reframing self-care as the skill of fueling your emotional, mental, and physical energy is a way to break through the guilt associated with it, and also the way that I feel like our society treats self-care as like, I don’t know, like a prize you get for doing enough, being tired enough. That’s how I used to practice it. I didn’t want to call it that. But like I’d get to a place where I was hardly functioning and then I’d zone out in front of Netflix for two hours, and I’d be like, oh yeah, self-care. That’s not self-care. That’s like your system shutting down and can’t do anymore work. And so, to me this is one of the most important reframes that I think we can make, and when I say we I mean individually, teams, companies, and our society, and it’s to recognize that, doesn’t matter how much you love your job, doesn’t mean you have unlimited energy to do it. And so recognizing that self-care and fueling your energy is your responsibility. And I love working with leaders on this and telling them that this is your number one leadership skill. And this is when you practice it and when you elevate it to that responsibility in the team, that’s where you see people really start to make a commitment to it. And so, I tell teams all the time talk about how your practicing self-care, put it on the agenda. In your one-on-ones, ask people what they’re doing to fuel their emotional, mental, and physical energy. And to me, this is, you know, I keep saying this in some interviews, I feel like the pandemic has shown us how essential this is, and yet I feel like old habits die hard. But I think it’s so essential to recognize that as a human being, energy is your fuel. And so, if you don’t continuously fuel your energy reservoir, you are going to run out. That’s where burnout happens. And you’re not going to be able to honor that meaningful work you care about or people in your life. And so reframing self-care that way I think is really, really powerful.
Jen: And what are some tips for how to better manage our energy. I’m assuming that looks different for everyone but maybe what are some of your go-tos.
Nataly: Yes, it’s a great question and it is different for everyone, but there’s a couple of common things. So the first thing is just to get into the habit. It’s one of the practices in the book, I call it “the check-in”. Just check in with yourself on a regular basis. I never did this before I burnt out. And if I heard this interview I would be gone right now. What do you mean check-in with myself and check how I’m feeling, who cares. Who cares? I don’t know what does that matter, but we check-in on our colleagues. We check-in on our teams, we say, hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling? So just becoming aware of, well, how is my emotional energy? How am I feeling physically is really powerful? Research shows that people who have this kind of awareness naturally have greater well-being because when you become aware that I’m feeling really frazzled or I am feeling really exhausted, you can then choose to do something to support yourself. So that’s the first step.
And then there’s kind of two areas I want everyone to think about, self-care is both about doing things that fuel your energy, but it’s also about doing fewer things that unnecessarily drain it. And I feel that area doesn’t get enough oomph, so actually spend more time on it in the book than doing things that fuel your energy. So a couple of things to think about. Just examples of things, do less multitasking, which is really not multitasking. It’s switch tasking, and it’s a form of emotional labor. It’s incredibly exhausting. Negative self-talk. The burnout doesn’t just come from having too much work. It comes from how we treat ourselves. And so constantly criticizing yourself drains your energy. Mindless social media scrolling, mindless reading on the news. Nothing wrong with the news. Nothing wrong with social media. I love Instagram, you know Jen, but it’s the mindless part. It’s when you go on to read one news story. It’s an hour and you’re reading about pandas in China, and you’re not quite sure why. I love pandas. It’s a mindless part that’s really draining. Making nonstop decisions, which I know is really, really tough for all of us who work because it just comes up, but we can get more intentional about which decisions to make and which decisions to not micromanage. Because making a decision takes energy. So think about what are one or two things that you do that unnecessarily drain your energy and how you could do them a little bit less and then in terms of fueling your energy, what I encourage everyone to do is dedicate at least 15 minutes a day. We all have 15 minutes, 15 minutes a day and I call up your daily fuel up. And do something during that time, I think you know, actually I’m going to correct myself. I was going to say I think we all know what fuels our energy. That’s not true, Jen. I can’t tell you how many workshops I’ve done during the pandemic where people have said to me, I have forgotten. I actually don’t know. And so have a little meeting with yourself. Have a little brainstorm. Think about what activities make you feel alive, give you a little bit of joy, invigorate you. And if you’d like a few ideas, taking a short walk outside is something I recommend to every single person. It can be a 5-minute walk during the day, but it boosts your mood and increases your motivation. It helps you feel a little bit more kind of centered in your own energy. But getting into that habit of checking in with yourself, so when you’re doing your daily fuel up, check in and be like well, how am I feeling? And that will guide you on days when I’m feeling really frazzled, maybe my 15 minutes of sitting in my big red chair, reading a little more Murakami. Maybe on days when I’m feeling really exhausted, I do a little yoga. So getting into that supportive relationship with yourself by checking in and then identifying something that can help you fill up that energy reservoir is a good way to think about it.
Jen: I know for me on the days that I’m feeling pretty good the check-ins are a lot easier. They come easier. They’re a lot more natural. When I’m frazzled it’s like I just skip right over it.
Nataly: So I’ll give you a suggestion. This is something I do. It’s really helpful for our brain to change our physical surroundings. Our brains are huge inertia machines. So if you’re sitting in front of your computer and you’re checking in with yourself and you’re feeling really frazzled, it’s really hard step out. Your brain just wants to keep rolling. So get up and maybe leave the room. Like, it can be for 30 seconds. I’ll often, so I’m in my home office now and then often when I want to check-in, I’ll get up and I’ll go make tea. And that is my checking in with myself and it really helps to physically change your surroundings. It helps to pause that interruption in our brains.
Jen: Love it. Alright we’ll still have 4 and 5, right?
Nataly: All right, so the next one you’re going to love with all the work that you do on connection. So the next skill is intentional kindness and compassion. And I probably don’t need to say this to the listeners of your awesome podcast, but as a reminder, as human beings, one of our core needs is to feel like we belong, is to feel like we are connected to other people. When we feel isolated, our brain interprets that as a sign of danger. It actually increases inflammation in our bodies. By the way that’s very different from being alone. Having quality alone time, I think, is really powerful form of self-care, but when we feel isolated. And so, we need to feel connected to other people. And the best way that I know how to fuel that sense of connection is through actively practicing kindness, which is nothing more complex than doing something kind and not expecting anything in return. And the thing that I have found, you know, as I’ve worked with so many teams and companies over the last couple of years is we tend to underestimate the powerful impact on ourselves and on other people are really small acts of kindness. Like, we just talked about checking in with ourselves, but checking in with a colleague, but not asking them about work just checking in and saying ‘John, how are you? How are you feeling?’ Whatever you want to share. Listening to others, giving people an opportunity to share or simply saying something meaningful to help elevate or fuel them or cheer them up. These are tiny things, but what they communicate to that person outside of our words or even a specific act is I care about you, and you are not alone. And that is so powerful and so essential, especially right now after everything we’ve gone through, but it turns out the biggest gift of kindness is actually to ourselves. Because every time you do something kind, you are literally reminding yourself I’m not alone. I am connected to people I care about and your brain also releases serotonin and oxytocin, which makes you feel really good, but I think it’s bigger than that. I think every act of kindness is this reminder to self and to the other person, we are not alone, and that is such a necessity. That’s such an important part of being alive. It’s like oxygen. It’s such a necessity.
And finally, is the bigger why. So acceptance, gratitude, self-care, intentional kindness, and the bigger why. The bigger why is the skill of really connecting to your sense of purpose by connecting the tasks and activities you do every day to how they help someone else, how they contribute to something bigger than you, or how they help you reach a meaningful goal. When we talk about sense of purpose in life or meaning, I think we always think of something really huge or something that’s like, it’s out there and I have to go find it. Well, your sense of purpose is in your to do list actually. It’s in your life as it is, and one of my favorite practices from the book, I call it the to do list makeover. It is very simple look at your to do list, pick a couple of to do’s the more annoying, the better. You know those to-dos that have been moving around for a couple of weeks like those are great.
Jen: You mean months?
Nataly: Exactly what did I say a week? And ask yourself who does this help? Like, when I get this done, who does it help and actually answer the question. And I cannot promise you that you’ll be like yes, oh my god, I’m so motivated to do this now, but I do promise you that you’ll feel a little bit more motivated to get it done. Because when we connect what we do to how it contributes to someone else, we enter what’s called a prosocial mindset, which helps us feel more motivated. It actually helps us better manage stress, because our stress then has purpose. So I’m not just stressed working on this new presentation. I am stressed working on this new presentation because I want to make it really good because it’s going to help a lot of people who are listening to me. And so the thing about stress actually, it’s a good thing I want to mention, stress in itself is not bad, but one of the hardest stresses for us in life is uncertain stress. Like the stress that’s just there and we don’t know when it would ever end. So when you’re working toward something or you have a bunch of to do’s and you’re really stressed out, connecting to your sense of purpose, like this is going to be helpful to this person. This is going to contribute to my team. I have this goal to write a book, so working on this draft is really helping me get further along in this goal. Your stress becomes more manageable because now you’re not just stressed, you’re stressed because you’re working toward something meaningful.
Jen: I love that reframing, reframing of stress is really, really…important.
Nataly: All the time.
Jen: Thank you for taking us through the emotional fitness skills and I think in particular, talking about how they could help us as individuals, but also about emotionally fit teams and how they can help us as leaders, but I think what I see the most of is that…because you said that we have to apply these skills to ourselves before we can create emotionally fit teams, but I think many leaders with the best of intentions don’t realize that they’re applying these skills to their teams, and they don’t realize that they’re not applying them to themselves, so they self-sacrifice. Like you did. And like I said, there’s so many people that have gone through burnout in the ways in which we have. And so how do we illuminate this gap to leaders because so many leaders that I know are incredible people and their desire is to take care of their teams at their own expense. And taking care of themselves feel selfish, and they just don’t have that lens to say, okay, wait, I do really need to apply this to myself before I can truly apply it to my team.
Nataly: It’s a great question, and I actually love this question. There is a whole chapter in my book on leadership because awesome humans are leaders, but it doesn’t mean you manage people. My definition of a leader is you’re a leader if you positively impact other people’s capacity to drive. So you can be an individual contributor with a lot of impact. And so I think it’s such an important thing to talk about, so a couple of things that I want to offer. I’ll start with the hardest one first, and this is something that I thought a long time about what would have stopped me in my tracks? What would have interrupted my inertia as a martyr leader? Because so many of us, and I write about this in my book, so many of us have taken this idea of servant leadership to mean martyr leadership, like at the expense of myself. By the way, I went back and I read the original essay by Robert Greenleaf about servant leader and nowhere in there does he talk about sacrificing yourself for your team. But we’ve taken it, you know, we as a society we like to make things extreme. This idea of leaders eat last. I wrote an HBR article about managers, please don’t put yourself last. And so the thing that would have interrupted me and this is hard, what I’m going to offer is hard, and I’ve worked with leaders who have done this. I really encourage you to have an honest conversation with your team or you can have this as an anonymous
Google Doc where you ask your team about things like how do they feel you’re doing as a leader in terms of your own emotional well-being? How your stress impacts them? And I have to tell you, I have had because I do the leadership programs and this is homework in one of them. And the leaders who did this, they came back with, I mean, they just sort of had this breakthrough because through the words of their very caring team members, what they heard was, listen when you don’t sleep when you work nonstop, you’re really snappy and I don’t really feel comfortable coming and talk to you, because I know you just can’t take it. So I just sort of take my problems and don’t tell you. And no caring leader wants their team to feel that way. I know this to be true, and so it’s actually something I remember so clearly my team really withdrawing when I was burning out and really not telling me anything because they didn’t think I can handle it. So have those hard, honest conversations but a couple of other things to just consider. As a leader, it’s not just your actions or your words that impact your team, your energy and your feelings do on their own. We are human beings. We are all connected. Our emotions are contagious. Our energy is contagious. We all know this to be true. You even get on a Zoom with someone or on a podcast or on the phone or in a meeting, and you immediately feel the energy of that person. So as a leader, what kind of energy? How do you want to be impacting your team? You know what energy I brought to my team when I ignored my own emotional fitness, heaviness. I just bought heaviness. Wherever I went it was this dark cloud of heaviness. And by the way my face could be covered with a nice fake smile. If you look at photos of me from like 10 years ago please don’t look at…you know there’s a lot of this, I call it the stock image of positive and confident leader. You know like arms crossed, fake smile. But I wasn’t fooling anyone. We sense each other’s energy. So as a leader, this is the question to ask yourself and to recognize that your number one job as a leader is not to manage projects or priorities or budgets. Your number one job is to manage emotions, your own, your team members, and to manage energy. And you simply can’t do it without paying attention to yours first. Because if you want to be that positive impact, if you want to positively impact your team’s ability to thrive, you have to recognize that your energy and your emotions are part of that.
Jen: So let’s talk about emotions and emotions in the workplace. So if your number one job as a leader is to manage emotions, yours and your teams’ and we talk about this in Work Better Together. So, I want to dig in with you, there’s this long-standing debate about emotions in the workplace, and do they have a role in the workplace, and are they good, are they bad? What’s your response to them?
Nataly: I don’t mean this to sound flippant, but I also kind of do, that’s a really ridiculous debate…
Jen: We can’t separate the human from the emotion…
Nataly: Yes, you know, it’s just like debating is there oxygen in the air and is it good for us. Well, try not breathing for a minute and there it is. So this debate, it has wrong hypothesis and part of the hypothesis is that somehow we could not bring our emotions with us to work, but that is a non…that can’t be. We don’t change into some uniform of machines, so the choice isn’t between emotions at work or not emotions at work. It’s emotions out in the open and acknowledging that they exist and acknowledging that they influence our ability to do great work and innovate and connect with each other. Or it’s pretending that they don’t. That’s the choice and we can’t leave them outside of ourselves. It is who we are and I am a little bit encouraged. I have to tell you, Jen, like I’m a little bit encouraged, just the many companies that I worked with throughout the pandemic that I feel like I’m hearing this less. It could be selective bias. I don’t know.
Jen: I think you are hearing it less, I would agree with that.
Nataly: Yeah, I’m hearing it less, and I think that I hate to like even use this term of the silver lining of the pandemic, but I think the pandemic has pushed us all to such an extreme place of stress and exhaustion and difficult emotions that in the workplace, we’ve seen that we really can’t remove them from who we are. Like they’ve become so extreme that they’re so evident. And so, I really don’t want that debate to die. I’d love to have a more productive conversation about how do we embrace? How do we teach ourselves and our teams at work to manage our emotions better, because it’s not just our own. Again, our emotions are contagious. So a team as a unit has an emotional culture to it. The relationship between the boss and the people who directly report to them is one of the most influential. So when that boss has greater well-being, is better about managing their emotions, everyone who reports to them is better at that and the other way around. So I’d like for us to instead have a conversation about well, how do we help each other better manage emotions at work? I think that’s a much more productive conversation.
Jen: Sign me up for that one. All right, so perhaps one last question for you, Nataly, and this is, as I knew it would be an amazing conversation, you talked about your experience with burnout. I have a similar but different experience with burnout and I would consider those kind of extreme cases of burnout, where we really weren’t able to like, continue functioning in the roles in our lives, but you also talk about daily burnout. So can you differentiate between the two of those and then also talk to me about how these emotional fitness skills can help us break free from daily burnout and big burnout?
Nataly: I see it as a kind of a snowball. When I look back I actually was burning out on a daily basis for a decade. And to me, daily burnout I think it’s something we can all relate to. It’s that feeling where you are just running on empty or barely empty all the time, where you feel spent at the end of every day. Where you start to really resent a work that maybe otherwise really care about, you start to withdraw socially. Those are all symptoms of burnout, but I think we can all relate to this feeling of just feeling this on a daily basis. I cannot tell you how many people use similar words to just tell me like I don’t know, I just feel like I sprint through every day on barely enough energy to get through. Then I collapse exhausted and all I do is think about my work. I don’t actually want to think about my work because I’m starting to really hate my job. So there’s a cycle of daily burnout and it snowballs and that’s what happened in my case. When I look back, I felt like that for a decade, I just ignored it, because I thought who cares again how I feel. So many of us…and by the way, I just want to acknowledge this like I teach this stuff for a living, and I’ve gone through a really dark, terrible burnout. And there are still days when I’m pretty burnt out. I’ve just gone through this book launch and I can probably tell you I probably would daily, maybe still am daily burnt out, I pushed it too far. The awesome thing, though, and this is the benefit we get when we practice these skills consistently is I have awareness and awareness is huge because awareness gives us choices. So I am aware that I’ve really depleted my energy reservoir, and therefore I am immediately making choices in my life to refuel. Like this past weekend for the long weekend for three days, I announced to my family, it was like the first weekend I wasn’t working, and I don’t know three years of the book. And I said I just need like, my brain is so tired from thinking I need to watch movies that require no thoughts. So we announced this is going to be a silly feel good movie weekend. So we watched, I just want to offer these, and to be a good citizen, so we watched The Proposal with Sandra Bullock. We watched, I think, Life As it Could Be.
Jen: See, I love it. You’re just like me I watch a movie and then like you know, three days later I can’t remember that I watched it or even what the name was.
Nataly: Three days later or an hour later, and maybe talking about…so I’m. Just putting an example. So, I became aware that I was so depleted in every way, but I immediately was like okay this is what I need. This is how I like, I need my system to rest. So awareness is really powerful. And so to me, you know, my big answer how do you break free from daily burnout is you recognize that you and your job are two separate entities in a relationship with each other. This is actually not even in the book. I kind of had this breakthrough after talking about the book. So I’m going to talk about this at Southby in a few weeks but just having that lens like I am in a relationship with my job. And like in any relationship with another person, it’s got to be healthy. What does that mean? That means I can’t just rely on my job to give me all that I need. No job can give us all that we need in life. So that means I have to fuel myself outside of work. I can be overly dependent on my job for all the things for all the joy and meaning, because that’s not a healthy relationship. And in order for me to come and be fueled at my job to do my best, I need to take care of myself. I need to do things to fuel my energy. So I offer this as a lens again as a way to look at your relationship with your job, I think it’s a really powerful way to kind of break free from that, you know, I’m just running it empty, trying to get done things down cycle. Because one of the myths about burnout, and I know you know this Jen is that we do burn out just from having too much work. That’s not the case. Having too much work is definitely part of it, but it’s just one thing. Feeling like what you’re doing doesn’t have purpose, feeling like you don’t have any control, feeling like you don’t…overidentifying with your job, so not really like having anything else. These are some other causes of burnout and daily burn out. So when we start to look at okay, so I’m in a relationship with my job. Like what kind of relationship is it? Is it healthy? Oh, I’m completely relying on my job for all joy and meaning, and now I hate it because it’s not giving me all joy and meaning. Okay, actually, need to go watch some silly movies or do some painting or see some friends or whatever else fuels me. I think it’s a really powerful construct that can help us break from that cycle.
Jen: I’m just taking a big deep inhale and deep exhale, because I don’t know who else needed to hear this today, but I needed to hear everything that you just gave us Nataly. So thank you.
Nataly: Well Jen, that means the world to me. As you know, on a personal level that means so much to me.
Jen: We talk about it often, but just because we do this work doesn’t mean that we too don’t need to be coached and reminded. If it was easy, we’d all be doing it. So we have to each other’s back.
Nataly: That’s why they’re skills. That’s the whole thing. That’s why these are skills. It’s not like what you know, I was talking to someone the other day who is a marathon runner. We were talking about this, and I said, well you wouldn’t expect yourself to just be able to run a marathon like get up out of the chair and run a marathon if you haven’t been running and training. So this is the same thing we have to practice these skills whether we teach them for a living, whether we’ve had really painful life lessons. These are skills. The more we practice, the easier it becomes to practice. But there isn’t, someone asked like well, so now you’ve been teaching this and practicing this for five years, and I’m like, yeah, and I still have to do it all the time. I just want to say like in closing, I think it’s a really beautiful thing, like one of the things that I feel fundamentally different about in my life is that my life is still challenging just like yours. Just like everyone who’s listening and I’m still human and my brain still gets in the way and all those things, but I have this toolkit with me and it’s with me all the time. Now, sometimes I choose not to use it. That’s on me, but it’s very empowering to know that these skills are with you. It gives us the
sense of yeah, this is hard, but I can support myself through it and that’s really priceless. That’s really an incredible feeling. A feeling I didn’t have for most of my life, but I really, really, daily appreciate.
Jen: I completely agree with you. It helps you remember that whatever it is I can get through it. Well, Nataly, thank you again so much. I knew this conversation was going to be incredible, and as usual you over delivered. So thank you again and it was just great to reconnect. I needed your energy today. It was absolutely contagious.
Nataly: Like I said that’s it. That’s all I need to hear. That’s my fuel, because as you know, after you launch a book, there’s all kinds of things and you’re like, wait, does anyone care? What does it matter? What did I do? So that is really meaningful to me and I’m so grateful, I really am grateful as always for such thoughtful questions because it helps me over deliver. And I’m so grateful that we got a chance to connect again, and I hope I delivered to the second time guest.
Jen: You did. You set the bar high for the next repeat guests. Thank you.
Nataly: Thanks so much and thank you team for making it awesome. And yeah, like I said means a lot to me and I just want you to know like I see when you share something in Instagram about you work out, I always like I don’t know there’s like a virtual hug flies your way. So just feel that next time you share something.
Jen: That means a lot. I’m so grateful Nataly could be with us today to talk about The Awesome Human Project. Thank you to our producers, Revit 360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various pod catchers using the keyword WorkWell, all one word, to hear more. And if you like the show don’t forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter at JenFish23. We’re always open to your recommendations and feedback. And of course if you like what you hear please share, post, and like this podcast. Thank you and be well.