How to Fail at Work AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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Episode: How to Fail at Work

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:42:38

Episode Shownotes

You can't alway win at work. We all have career setbacks and disappointments - and learning how to deal with them is vital. We need to move on from our mistakes, accept that we're not superhuman, and be willing to see failure as the price of experimenting and taking risks.

Former news anchor Dan Harris (of 10% Happier with Dan Harris and DanHarris.com) joins Dr Laurie Santos to discuss the things that have gone wrong in his work life (he had a panic attack live on national TV) - and the ways in which we can reframe how we greet our career failures. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode of 'The Happiness Lab,' Dr. Laurie Santos and former news anchor Dan Harris discuss the importance of accepting failure as an integral part of personal and professional growth. Harris shares his experience of a panic attack on live television, which he initially viewed as a failure but later reframed as a turning point that led him to therapy and meditation. The conversation covers how societal pressures, such as perfectionism and the influence of social media, contribute to the fear of failure, and emphasizes the value of resilience, self-compassion, and emotional awareness in navigating career setbacks. Ultimately, failure is presented as a necessary step toward learning and self-improvement.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (How to Fail at Work) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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This special episode of The Happiness Lab is brought to you by State Farm. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. For our special show on World Mental Health Day, I assembled a group of well-being experts I like to call the titans of happiness.

00:02:03 Speaker_06
Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Harris, and Sesame Street's Elmo. It was a super fun crew to hang out with, but most importantly, we covered a lot of ground. We gave you some of the most effective and easiest happiness hacks around.

00:02:24 Speaker_06
But this year's World Mental Health Day was dedicated to happiness in the workplace, a topic that's way too big to fit into just one show. So I'm bringing you another two episodes on the subject of work and well-being.

00:02:35 Speaker_06
And I asked one of my happiness titans, Dan Harris, to return to the show to help. And the topic of happiness at work is one that's pretty important for Dan.

00:02:44 Speaker_06
In fact, Dan's entire foray into the study of happiness began after a very unfortunate incident on the job.

00:02:52 Speaker_01
2004, a little bit over 20 years ago, I was on Good Morning America filling in as what was called the newsreader. We don't really have this job anymore, but back then there would be somebody who would come on at the top of each hour.

00:03:06 Speaker_01
So the morning shows at that time went from 7 to 9. And Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of Good Morning America, her job then was to come on and read a set of headlines at the top of the seven and the eight o'clock hour.

00:03:17 Speaker_01
And I was filling in for her on this June morning. And I had done this many times before. I wasn't nervous going in, but a few seconds into my shtick, I was supposed to read six brief news items off of the teleprompter.

00:03:33 Speaker_01
And by the way, I was 32 or something like that at the time. I have for more than 10 years been on television reading off of a teleprompter. So I really, just to set the table here, I didn't have any idea about what was about to happen.

00:03:49 Speaker_01
I was not prepared. And a few seconds into my thing, I just kind of lost it. My heart was racing. My palms were sweating. My mouth dried up. My lungs seized up. I lost the ability to speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're anchoring the news.

00:04:06 Speaker_01
And I had to kind of squeak out a back to you, Charlie and Diane, the main hosts of the show at the time were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson and

00:04:16 Speaker_01
you know, I kind of got away with it in that it was, if you look at it, actually, if you Google panic attack on television, it's the number one result, which is, my mom is very proud of that.

00:04:26 Speaker_01
If you look at it, for many people, especially people who've never had a panic attack before, it doesn't look that bad. I kind of hold it together.

00:04:33 Speaker_01
I know when I look at it, and a lot of people, you know, my mom who was watching live knew exactly what was happening, but the people in the studio were concerned

00:04:43 Speaker_01
But when I lied to them, and I'm not proud to admit this, but I did lie and say, yeah, you know, I don't know what happened. I'm fine. They kind of let it pass. But I actually knew exactly what had happened.

00:04:53 Speaker_01
I had I had had little moments of this on television before I had dealt with stage fright for a long time. I sometimes joke that my career has been a triumph of narcissism over fear. And I really wanted to be on TV and I love the job.

00:05:09 Speaker_01
But I did have this, you know, bedrock stage fright. I had I had, however, never had anything that strong. And so that moment turned out to be one of the seminal moments of my life in my career, too.

00:05:20 Speaker_06
And I bet at the moment you didn't necessarily think that. Right. I mean, at the moment, it must have felt like a profound failure, like an enormous screw up, like on live television.

00:05:29 Speaker_01
A million percent, yes, that's exactly what it felt like. I felt totally humiliated and terrified that I was not going to be able to do this job anymore, that I was just going to, this was going to just keep on happening.

00:05:43 Speaker_01
There was no silver lining in the moment.

00:05:45 Speaker_06
But in the future, you're able to turn this into a huge benefit. You're able to learn from this. So tell me what could happen next.

00:05:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a long time. Well, nothing much happened initially, just to, you know, I don't know, you know, many of your listeners may not have been of age in 2004.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
And for those of you who were, you may not remember this or maybe you do, but public, discussions of mental health were quite limited at that time.

00:06:15 Speaker_01
So it wasn't like I could turn around a week later and say I had a panic attack and I'm going to turn this into some sort of public health message that people might rally around. No, there was none of that at the time.

00:06:28 Speaker_01
So that's why I really felt compelled to lie, because I knew this was not the type of thing I could safely share with my bosses.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
What did happen is that I ended up my mother, who was watching and was at the time quite a prominent academic physician at Harvard and also very interested in her son's well-being, got me in to see a shrink, a psychiatrist.

00:06:52 Speaker_01
He diagnosed right away what was going on, because I didn't have a sense of why this had happened. I knew it was a panic attack, but I didn't know why. And he asked me a question, which was, do you do drugs? I sheepishly said yes.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
And he didn't say this, but he gave me a look that said, OK, asshole, mystery solved. Now we know what happened. Just briefly, as a backstory, I had started doing cocaine after spending a lot of time in war zones.

00:07:22 Speaker_01
After 9-11, and I wasn't high on the air, but it was enough that ambient drug use was enough for my shrink to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to have a panic attack.

00:07:35 Speaker_01
So under his tutelage, I quit doing drugs and began quite intensive therapy for about 10 years.

00:07:41 Speaker_01
And in the course of those 10 years, I started getting interested in meditation, in part because of his influence, although he doesn't meditate himself, and in part because I was just reading more broadly about mental health.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
And so when I started getting interested in meditation, I realized there was, at that time, a not very well-publicized but quite robust body of scientific research that suggested that meditation could have a bunch of health benefits.

00:08:10 Speaker_01
And and yet many of the books that I was reading about meditation didn't speak to me. I mean, I could get through it, but they were quite quite annoying. And so I wanted to write a book that used the F word a lot and told embarrassing stories.

00:08:24 Speaker_01
And so I I led that the book I wrote about it, which was called 10 percent happier, which is now 10 years old.

00:08:31 Speaker_01
I led that book with the story of the panic attack and how it put me on this path to discovering meditation and all of the interesting things that happened after that.

00:08:42 Speaker_06
And so that, though, was one of the only the first times that you use moments of failure to kind of learn and generate new career paths and so on. You've also had a more recent example of this, which you've referred to as your career earthquake.

00:08:54 Speaker_06
So I'm curious what that was and how that failure has changed things for you.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
Well, thank you for pointing out that I continue to fuck things up on the regular. I appreciate that.

00:09:04 Speaker_06
This is an episode about how to fail better. And I feel like of folks who fail pretty well, you are definitely one of my favorite examples.

00:09:09 Speaker_01
So I'm nailing it. I am nailing it. Yeah. I mean, just one thing to say by way of context, because sometimes people say to me, you know, you are. quite anxious for an alleged happiness expert or a quasi self-help guru.

00:09:27 Speaker_01
And to me, that gets the causality wrong. I have become an expert or a quote-unquote expert in this stuff. I would say not as much of an expert as you, in that I'm not a scientist and I don't have a full grasp of the research in the way you do.

00:09:46 Speaker_01
And we'll talk about some of that coming up. I am a flawed person, I continue to be a flawed person, and I try to be open about that as a way to normalize other people's flaws.

00:10:01 Speaker_01
There's an expression, I don't know who said this, but this expression, cathartic normalization, and that's like my whole brand. I'm just a journalist who's been meditating for a while and very interested, you know, on my own podcast,

00:10:18 Speaker_01
all ways in which we can do life better. But that doesn't mean that I'm perfected.

00:10:22 Speaker_01
And I'm very suspicious of people who present themselves as perfect, just to give that context for the next story that you're teaming up to tell, which is that after I wrote 10% Happier, I did not expect it to turn into anything.

00:10:37 Speaker_01
I remember Barbara Walters, then a major figure in broadcast news, explicitly telling me when I told her what I was writing my book about, don't quit your day job. Yeah, so that gives you an idea of what the culture was like.

00:10:49 Speaker_01
So I didn't go into the publication of that book with anything other than fear, but I certainly – I didn't think – I mean I harbored some fantasies that it would be successful, but I didn't really think it would happen.

00:11:01 Speaker_01
And it just turned out that it came out at the right time.

00:11:04 Speaker_01
right when meditation was starting to get cool again, and right when we were starting to be more open about public health, mental health issues publicly, and ABC News really got behind the book. And so it took off, which was amazing.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
And it led to a bunch of opportunities, including starting a meditation app, which was called 10% Happier. And so that company was around for about eight years under the name 10% Happier. In recent years, I developed a series of

00:11:34 Speaker_01
interpersonal and creative and financial differences with my co-founders, who are excellent people. There's no bad guy in this story. If there is one, maybe it's me. Just to say I take 50% of the responsibility at least for this failure.

00:11:50 Speaker_01
I do want to say that they are continuing to operate the company. So I don't want to call the company a failure. It still exists. It's called the Happier Meditation app. So it's no longer called 10% Happier. But the separation from the company

00:12:04 Speaker_01
was incredibly difficult for me. I experienced a lot of anger and fear and frustration. And there were many times where I lost my temper and I lost, I was, I lost my ability to sleep for several years.

00:12:16 Speaker_01
My, you know, I really took a significant toll on my mental and physical health. If you look at pictures before this, I mean, I had way fewer gray hairs.

00:12:27 Speaker_01
So this is one of the hardest things I've ever gone through, you know, cause I considered the company to be my baby and I don't have it anymore.

00:12:34 Speaker_06
I think this story is really profound because it illustrates a number of the different kinds of ways that failure can affect us. I mean, a big one is just the effect that failure can have on our health, right?

00:12:44 Speaker_06
Like you're not sleeping, you're not eating. I mean, you've talked about this really bluntly that you just didn't basically sleep at all for several years while this was going on.

00:12:53 Speaker_06
But an even bigger one that I think I hear in your story is this idea that failure can really affect our identity, like our sense of who I was. And this seems to be a big one in your story.

00:13:01 Speaker_06
You'd stepped away from this role of being a kind of news person for ABC. You became this kind of co-CEO of a company. And now all of a sudden, that identity seems to be kind of falling apart, or at least generating lots of conflict.

00:13:13 Speaker_06
How did you handle that?

00:13:14 Speaker_01
Not well. And I do want to hear some stories from you about I'm not aware of any failures on your end, but to the extent that they've happened, I want to I do want to hear about them if you're comfortable talking about it.

00:13:25 Speaker_01
But I will say that you've you've nailed it. I mean, you're you're pointing at it. One of the big. Points of struggle for me was the identity piece of this, it was embarrassing.

00:13:39 Speaker_01
Even though the struggle behind the scenes lasted for nearly three years, it wasn't public, but the people in my life knew about it, and I knew eventually it was going to be public, and I was embarrassed.

00:13:49 Speaker_01
I'm supposed to be Mr. Mindfulness, and here I am embroiled in this protracted conflict, and yeah, I felt like a fraud.

00:13:58 Speaker_01
Honestly, and I felt, you know, very helpless that I couldn't wave a magic wand and make this go away because there were two parties at the table and we had a lot of contracts that we had signed that needed to be unwound and I couldn't just make things happen my way.

00:14:13 Speaker_01
And so, you know, I wasn't sleeping. I started having panic attacks again and I'm still dealing with the reverberations of that. You know, the panic attacks this time really started to come

00:14:24 Speaker_01
in situations of claustrophobia, which my current shrink has had a field day with. And so, you know, I'm still struggling to get on planes and in elevators, and I'm doing it, but you're absolutely right.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
It took a big toll, and especially on the identity front. Not only did I feel embarrassed as a mental health spokesperson of sorts to be in this situation, but as you mentioned, I had retired from ABC News

00:14:50 Speaker_01
now about three years ago, and it was right after I retired from the news that the problems started coming up with my co-founders. And so I no longer have my news anchor identity.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
And now this app that I had like poured so much of myself into was is no longer mine. And yeah, so that's all been very challenging.

00:15:09 Speaker_06
But one of the reasons we're having this conversation is that you've managed to do really cool things from this moment of kind of career earthquake. And also, you've learned a lot.

00:15:17 Speaker_06
And those are the kinds of learnings that we're going to get to when the Happiness Lab gets back from the break.

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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude. And so today I wanted to give a shout out to my mom. Mom, thanks for everything you do.

00:17:29 Speaker_06
I get to give a nice shout out to my mom, but there's someone else we should all be giving a shout out to, ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're all trying our best, and in this crazy world, that's not always easy.

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00:18:41 Speaker_06
Workplaces can be this sort of spot that we generate lots and lots of happiness, but they can also be these places where we experience failure.

00:18:48 Speaker_06
So I think kind of looking really carefully at the kinds of ways that we get failure wrong and the ways that we can benefit from failure can be really important.

00:18:55 Speaker_06
And I think one of the biggest teachings that it sounds like you've come up with or you've talked about on your show is this idea that even though failure is really scary and it's got all these terrible elements, it's not actually as bad as we think.

00:19:06 Speaker_06
Like there are benefits that can come from it. Explain what you mean there.

00:19:10 Speaker_01
Many benefits, many. As somebody who fails regularly, I can tell you there are many benefits. And I actually think that we might even want to play with that word.

00:19:19 Speaker_01
I don't know what an alternative is, but maybe it's something in the range of experimentation. You know, I think we live in a pandemic of perfectionism, and I'm sure you see this on campus with your students.

00:19:32 Speaker_01
Perfectionism is really on the rise and it is such an insidious thing. People are unwilling to take risks because they don't want to fail.

00:19:41 Speaker_01
A part that I think this is because we live our lives so publicly on social media, this kind of panopticon we've created for ourselves where everybody can see what we're doing. We feel so much pressure to

00:19:51 Speaker_01
present a curated perfected version of ourselves when of course our lives aren't like that and and then of course we're comparing ourselves to other people's lives that seem perfect and we know that we're a mess and so something must be uniquely wrong with us and and one of the many many pernicious impacts of this is that people are unwilling often to take risks and to run experiments and

00:20:15 Speaker_01
A big part of running experiments and taking risks is you're going to fail. But to reframe that, you know, there's a difference between humiliation and humility.

00:20:24 Speaker_01
You can be humbled in a good way in that you've learned something about yourself and about the world as opposed to humiliation, which kind of coils you up in.

00:20:35 Speaker_01
thoughts about yourself where you're stuck in shame, you're stuck in your own, as I sometimes say, and I think I said this the last time I was on your show, that your head's up your ass in a pretty profound way.

00:20:46 Speaker_01
And I know that's kind of a gross image, but when you're in that mode, it's hard to learn.

00:20:52 Speaker_01
But when you can be in a mode of humility or to use a term from your milieu, when you've got a growth mindset, which is that you're willing to take risks and a failure doesn't mean somehow you are unworthy or perpetually incapable.

00:21:11 Speaker_01
It just means you learned a thing and you can grow from it. Does that all land for you, given what you know about the research?

00:21:18 Speaker_06
Yeah, completely. I mean, I think the growth mindset idea is really quite apt, right? I think we don't often enough kind of put the word yet at the end of everything we do, right?

00:21:28 Speaker_06
I started a new meditation company and it hasn't really worked out yet, right? I quit my job and tried to do something new in the field, but it hasn't worked out yet.

00:21:38 Speaker_06
Carol Dweck's research suggests just putting that word yet at the end just completely reframes the way you're thinking, right? Because it's not like, well, I've screwed up, everything's over, I'm dead. It's like, oh, it just hasn't clicked yet, right?

00:21:49 Speaker_06
There's some time for this to kind of work out. And I've learned something, so I'm more likely to get it the next time because I've sort of figured it out. I think that mindset shift is kind of huge.

00:21:58 Speaker_06
I think another mindset shift that's really big, and it seems like one that you've embraced a bit, is just this idea that, like, it's actually not as bad as we think, right? That like, ultimately, you're probably going to be okay, right?

00:22:09 Speaker_06
This sort of stems from some of the lovely work by Dan Gilbert and his colleagues about how bad we are, what he calls affective forecasting, which is just like predicting how bad some bad event is actually going to be.

00:22:19 Speaker_06
We have so many mechanisms in our mind to make it go a little bit better that it's really never as bad as we often think.

00:22:25 Speaker_01
That's so well said. You know, we've interviewed one another many times over the years, but actually we haven't spent I don't think any time in person.

00:22:33 Speaker_01
So I don't know you that while we have this kind of I have this kind of parasocial relationship with you, but observing you from a distance.

00:22:42 Speaker_01
It seems like your career is just a progress of strength to strength to strength, you know, starting this course, which is the most popular course that's ever existed at Yale and then starting this podcast, which is so huge.

00:22:55 Speaker_01
But have you encountered professional setbacks that you'd be comfortable talking about?

00:23:00 Speaker_06
Oh my gosh, of course.

00:23:01 Speaker_06
I mean, one of the biggest ones was that, you know, as I was starting this big class and starting this podcast, and running a residential college at Yale and doing all this work, I got incredibly burned out, like so burned out that I wound up taking time off my role as being a head of college, which was

00:23:17 Speaker_06
embarrassing for all the reasons that you just talked about, right? I'm supposed to be the self-help guru and here I am completely burned out. And the form of my burnout was a particular one, which is that I got incredibly cynical.

00:23:28 Speaker_06
So these clinical psychologists who talk about burnout often talk about these sort of three features of burnout. One is the one we usually think about where you're emotionally exhausted. And I was for sure that, right? You take a weekend off and

00:23:39 Speaker_06
you come back Monday morning, you're just as depleted as when you'd started before. Like I was I was feeling that.

00:23:45 Speaker_06
I was also feeling what they call a sense of personal ineffectiveness, that even if I was doing my job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't be good enough, or I wouldn't be proud of it. This is all going down kind of at the tail end of COVID when

00:23:56 Speaker_06
just doing things on campus generally wasn't very fun.

00:23:59 Speaker_06
But the particular insidious consequence of burnout that I was experiencing that I was most embarrassed about was what researchers called depersonalization, which is kind of just a form of cynicism, which is like everyone that you work with and care about is getting on your last nerve, and you want to just explode on them all the time.

00:24:17 Speaker_06
You even start viewing their intentions as kind of evil or like just a pain in the ass. And this was what I was experiencing with my students, right?

00:24:24 Speaker_06
I'd get an email from a student who, you know, had to get a root canal and needed, you know, some money from the college to be able to do it.

00:24:31 Speaker_06
And my instant reaction wasn't just like true compassion for the student, which is what I like to think was the typical reaction for most of my career. My reaction was like, oh, what a pain in the ass. Like I have to send these other emails.

00:24:43 Speaker_06
And when I started noticing this, like at first I didn't want to tell anybody because I felt kind of like a fraud. I felt a little bit ashamed for having those emotions, right?

00:24:51 Speaker_06
Like I'm supposed to be in this role where I have utter compassion for the students in my community and I wasn't feeling it. But I think in part because of my training in some of this stuff, I'm mindful enough to notice these signs, right?

00:25:03 Speaker_06
I'm like, wait a minute, this is like a huge flashing emotional signal that's not supposed to be there. That's telling me I'm overwhelmed and I need to take some time off. So

00:25:12 Speaker_06
Yeah, at the kind of realizing that I stepped away from my role as a head of college on campus, not as public that use it wasn't like on live TV, but I had a front page New York Times magazine article about like happiness professor burned out and got a call from my mother-in-law who was like, were you gonna tell us that you're

00:25:29 Speaker_06
like stepping away from your role and taking a year off. So yeah, so I think we all have our own forms of what feels like failure, what feels like us not living up to our ideals. And that was definitely a moment for me where I was feeling that way.

00:25:44 Speaker_06
So I can relate to the F word, not the F word we keep talking about, the failure F word.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
That's an incredible story. I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but I'm like proud of you for telling it. I don't mean that in a patronizing way at all. It's just it's like very brave. Other than taking time off, what helped you pull out of it?

00:26:06 Speaker_06
Well, taking time off was huge. And I took time off in a big way. Like I just left Yale for a year.

00:26:11 Speaker_06
I moved to Boston, just like hold up with friends, just kind of restructured my life around thinking about the podcast and stuff, but not doing a lot of my professorial work. And that changed a lot. You know, I mean, therapy was part of it too, right?

00:26:25 Speaker_06
As like, you know, as it always is, but it was really trying to focus on like, what have I been telling everybody to do? And what would I tell, myself in this situation.

00:26:34 Speaker_06
And for me, I think the difference, which kind of gets back to a lot of the stuff that you've talked about was that it was the normal stuff that I teach students these behavioral changes, right, like engage in more social connection and, you know, exercise and try to focus on your sleep.

00:26:46 Speaker_06
But a lot of it was changes to my self talk. A lot of it was changes to that crappy drill sergeant voice in my head telling me I have to be the perfect happiness expert all the time.

00:26:58 Speaker_06
I was embracing Kristen Neff's self-compassion work in a huge, huge way. And that, honestly, was a lot of what has helped a lot.

00:27:06 Speaker_06
And that is one of the reasons I feel like I've overcome my burnout enough to get back into the classroom and do more work at Yale and really get back to this work in a different way.

00:27:15 Speaker_01
It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly, modeling failure and the resilience. I just don't want that to slip by. It's awesome that you've done it and now you're back in the classroom. That's a huge deal.

00:27:30 Speaker_01
I also just want to, you know, plus one on the work of Kristen Neff.

00:27:34 Speaker_01
Self-compassion, which always scanned to me as a, you know, I'm going to use some social justice boilerplate here, but always scanned to me as, you know, as a heteronormative cis male as beyond the pale cheesy. But.

00:27:51 Speaker_01
One of the amazing things that Kristen's done is muster a pretty convincing amount of research backing for the argument that if you can learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, it can make you much more effective.

00:28:07 Speaker_06
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but I can't help say my favorite example of Kristin Neff's work that I think really shows how powerful and how not kind of wooey this sort of technique is, is her lovely work showing that if you teach self-compassion techniques to combat veterans,

00:28:23 Speaker_06
they're less likely to get PTSD. And I love this study because it gets around what I sometimes find is a challenge talking about the self-compassion work, which is that it has really crappy marketing, if we're being really honest, right?

00:28:34 Speaker_06
It sounds sort of like fluffy and self-compassion-y and like you're going to talk to yourself like a friend. And I remember talking about this work in front of folks from the military.

00:28:43 Speaker_06
I was doing a talk for Navy SEALs, and you could see the faces in the audience where I'm putting this up of like, You know, talk to yourself. It's all about self-kindness. And they're rolling their eyes.

00:28:52 Speaker_06
But then you show the data where it's like, actually, when you train folks in the military to be a bit more mindful, to kind of stop the drill sergeant in their head, even though they're listening to the drill sergeant on the field, now all of a sudden, they start performing better.

00:29:04 Speaker_06
They wind up healthier in the face of true conflict and really terrible circumstances. Now it starts to seem less kind of woo-woo and a little bit more like science-y and in the trenches.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
Absolutely. And for me, it's, again, as somebody who's probably who's Factory settings are closer to somebody who's in the military, although physically I never would have cut it in the military, but I'm a little bit psychologically closer to that.

00:29:30 Speaker_01
It's not so much the self kindness, the self compassion of it all sounded vaguely auto erotic to me. It was it was more like. Switching up from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach and an inner.

00:29:42 Speaker_01
We've all had good coaches and they don't shy away from pointing out where our flaws are and when we've made mistakes, but they're just not assholes about it. And that's that's what's being called for here. Not some sort of.

00:29:56 Speaker_01
ooey-gooey, you know, staring in the mirror and talking to yourself, kissing the mirror and talking about how great you are.

00:30:02 Speaker_01
It's really about having a dry-eyed, clear-eyed, but warm sense of self-appraisal and talking yourself through it, again, the way you would with your kid or a good friend if they called you in a moment where they were in extremis.

00:30:17 Speaker_01
And that's really helpful. And I would add on top of this, and I'm sure you know his work way better than I do, but I have found as a supplement to Kristen Neff's work,

00:30:25 Speaker_01
and this is all very relevant to how you talk to yourself in failure, is Ethan Cross from the University of Michigan and all of the work he's done specifically looking at how to most effectively talk to yourself.

00:30:36 Speaker_06
Yeah, and just the simple way that you can do that by using your own name, or as I know, you do Dan, not Dan, but Dude. Hey, Dude, what are you doing? It's fine. It's gonna be all right. Let's take a long view.

00:30:48 Speaker_06
It's probably not as bad as you think, right? Yeah, those types of techniques have been really, really huge for me too.

00:30:56 Speaker_06
Another one that I know you've talked a lot about on the podcast that I think is something that's resonated with both of our stories of failure is how you navigate negative emotions and whether you allow them in.

00:31:07 Speaker_06
I think I wouldn't be in a healthier place than I was when I was feeling my maximal burnout right now if I didn't really allow the emotion of overwhelm, if I didn't like sit with it and notice it, which is definitely not my instinct, right?

00:31:22 Speaker_06
As like a, you know, hardcore type A academic at an Ivy League university, I'm a very kind of stiff upper lip, squish that emotion down, this is very inconvenient, I'm going to ignore it and sort of power through.

00:31:32 Speaker_06
But like, actually noticing how depleted I was feeling, as awful as it was feeling, was sort of really essential for kind of getting better. And my understanding is that this has been part of your story, too, this idea of kind of

00:31:45 Speaker_06
embracing those negative emotions rather than running away from them.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
Absolutely. I'm curious, what modalities did you use? Was it therapy? Was it meditation? What were your practices that helped you not be at war with your own inner reality?

00:32:02 Speaker_06
Partly therapy, partly a lot of this just focus on noticing what my thought patterns were.

00:32:06 Speaker_06
That hasn't for me come so much through like more formal meditation practices, but a lot of these sort of maybe informal self-taught practices of just kind of noticing it. I think I mostly felt it in my body, right?

00:32:18 Speaker_06
It was sort of helpful that this was during COVID time and you're sort of trapped in your house. I feel like I was able to notice my body more. I wasn't traveling around. I wasn't as busy kind of in the typical way that I was.

00:32:29 Speaker_06
And so it just helped to sort of notice that a little bit more. But yeah, for me, it was pretty embodied to just kind of feel it and notice it.

00:32:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, to me, that all sounds great. I know that I'm known as, to the extent that anybody knows who I am, as kind of Mr. Meditation, and I really am a deep believer in the power of the practice, but I'm not a meditation fundamentalist.

00:32:52 Speaker_01
What I would say, however, in this regard, in this particular sphere of being able to sit with your emotions, which is a really counterintuitive but powerful skill. Meditation for me has been a – it is a – it goes right at that.

00:33:09 Speaker_01
It is – with extreme prejudice, it goes right at this value proposition of being able to weather your own internal storms by giving you a set of tools to sit in the middle of it without being owned by it.

00:33:23 Speaker_01
One little phrase that might be useful that people could use as an inner slogan or a mantra in this regard, whether you meditate or not, is, and this comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's, in my opinion, just a brilliant, brilliant human being.

00:33:40 Speaker_01
And he teaches with these little phrases, these little slogans that are kind of like, earworms, and for me they really come up in moments when I need them. And so this one is going to sound very basic and simple, but it's profound. And it is this.

00:33:56 Speaker_01
It's okay. Now this does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay to feel what you're feeling right now. You can handle it. Instead of pushing it away, which doesn't work, or

00:34:10 Speaker_01
getting overwhelmed by it and acting out of it, you know, meaning inviting in the anger and then nurturing it and living in that space for 20 years or whatever.

00:34:21 Speaker_01
It just means that, you know, the half-life of an emotion is whatever, 45, you probably know there's like 45 seconds or something like that. We tend to make the emotion last for days, years, a lifetime.

00:34:33 Speaker_01
But actually, if you just tell yourself, it's okay, I can feel this anger right now. It will naturally come and go and there is extraordinary freedom on the other side of it when you realize, okay, I didn't do anything.

00:34:45 Speaker_01
I didn't say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage. My son and I are in a hotel room right now and we ordered cronuts because we're in Vegas and they deliver cronuts to the room and I'm looking at a cronut right now.

00:34:57 Speaker_01
And if I was angry and not aware of it or unwilling to sit with it, I might just eat the whole cronut, right?

00:35:03 Speaker_01
Which again, I don't wanna make food sinful or anything like that, but you can do lots of things that won't feel good ultimately, like say something, point it to somebody or eat when you're not hungry. And instead, it's okay.

00:35:18 Speaker_01
Like I can just feel this discomfort. for 45 seconds or however long it lasts, it will pass. It'll probably come back again, but it will pass. And once it's passed, you can make better decisions.

00:35:30 Speaker_01
And you can also see that you can survive more than you think you can.

00:35:34 Speaker_06
I love It's Okay. Can I tell you my latest earworm that I'm loving a lot? It comes from the clinical psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, who has this great new book called How to Be Enough. But she says we have to go less frozen and more beetles.

00:35:48 Speaker_06
That when we think of dealing with our negative emotions, we want to let it go, but we have to let it be. I love this idea because I've never been a huge Frozen fan, so less Frozen, more Beatles. Not let it go, let it be.

00:35:59 Speaker_06
Because I think this idea is we think, well, just like get rid of those emotions or try to toss them out. But the sad thing is that the real practice is being like, nope, I'm just going to hang out with you. I'm not going to run.

00:36:11 Speaker_06
I'm just going to let you take your course. And that can be super scary. And our instinct is just to squish it down and push it away. But it's really the act of sitting through the emotion that allows us to get through it.

00:36:21 Speaker_06
And sometimes that allows us to see that the emotion we thought it was isn't exactly what it was.

00:36:28 Speaker_06
And I know this is something you talked a lot about in kind of your career earthquake, is that the first presentation of a lot of the emotions you were dealing with was anger, anger at the company, anger at the situation or the contract or whatever.

00:36:41 Speaker_06
But what did you find out when you sat with the anger? Did it stay anger all the time?

00:36:45 Speaker_01
That's a great question. First of all, just to say I love Ellen Hendrickson, too. I didn't know she had a new book, so I need to get her on my show.

00:36:52 Speaker_01
But she wrote a book years ago about social anxiety that I still quote to people who are struggling with that. Yes, anger. For me, when I sat with it, I realized that it was it's often described as a secondary emotion, as you know.

00:37:08 Speaker_01
So it's often covering up for something else. And for me, if I could muster the wherewithal to sit with the discomfort of the anger, I could see that underneath it was fear. And that's a hard thing.

00:37:24 Speaker_01
Again, it just kind of goes back to how masculinity can manifest. I know for men, for many men, we don't want to admit that we're scared. And so anger is a much more comfortable place to be.

00:37:36 Speaker_01
A friend of mine once joked that he had two emotional gears, anger and self-pity. And I really see myself in that.

00:37:46 Speaker_01
You know, as painful as it is, it's better, I think, to tune into what's really going on than to just be stuck in the anger, because you're much less likely, in my experience, to get to resolution if you stay in the anger.

00:38:00 Speaker_01
But to tune into the fear, like, what am I worried about? I'm worried about all the identity stuff that you brought up earlier. What is this all going to say about me? I'm worried about

00:38:09 Speaker_01
Am I going to, you know, am I going to have to, like, sell the house and move my family somewhere else? Lots of things I was worried about.

00:38:17 Speaker_01
And I have, you know, for me, this is actually something that makes failure such a fraught issue, especially at work. I have. This really I think this really deep ancestral fear of destitution, and it's totally irrational.

00:38:38 Speaker_01
I am absolutely comfortable financially. I have had every advantage that is available, except for maybe the fact that I'm not tall.

00:38:47 Speaker_01
But, you know, white, straight, male, raised by loving parents who are upper middle class, was able to go to college, all of the advantages. And yet I just, I have this nagging, irrational fear about running out of money.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
and have learned later in life that I had a great grandfather. His name is Arthur Lebow. He was it was Lebowitz, but he changed it to Lebow because it wasn't a great place for Jews in the early 1900s. And the United States wasn't.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
And he wanted to sound French. And he was a total like huckster and, you know, had a series of failed businesses and ultimately became a bail bondsman, but a corrupt one and was putting up his family members houses as

00:39:31 Speaker_01
collateral for these crooks to get out of jail. And one of them, Skip Bond and this guy, the FBI swooped in and I might I found a bunch of articles about this, like the FBI swooped in. My great grandmother had to like testify in federal court.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
And Arthur Labow took his own life in the family kitchen and his daughters found.

00:39:50 Speaker_06
Oh, my gosh.

00:39:51 Speaker_01
Yeah. And that dude's energy is in my veins. And. That's just the best explanation I can come up with for why I, or at least part of why this is such a bugaboo for me. And so in failure, I've had the opportunity to get a little bit closer to this dude.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
And for me, what's really helpful is to be like, when I see him rearing his head, thank you.

00:40:22 Speaker_01
you know, thank you, this is, I don't, you're giving me shitty ideas, I'm not gonna, hopefully I'm not gonna act on them, but the impulse is, as one of the great meditation teachers I know, a guy named Jack Kornfeld, the impulse is just the organism trying to protect itself, right?

00:40:37 Speaker_01
So it fundamentally is a helpful instinct to have all this fear or to be like hustling all the time to like make sure that my career's in a good place,

00:40:49 Speaker_01
But over time, as I've been able to make peace with this character internally, I'm less owned by him. It's a kind of radical disarmament. Does all that make sense to you?

00:41:00 Speaker_06
No, totally. I think there are two things in there that really fit with the science, right?

00:41:03 Speaker_06
The first is this idea of kind of having gratitude for this belief that's otherwise causing this terrible scarcity mindset, maybe causing you to make bad decisions.

00:41:12 Speaker_06
But if your instinct was to hate it, which I'm sure probably is your natural instinct, but if you kind of went with that instinct to hate it,

00:41:18 Speaker_06
and you're just angry at it the whole time, you wouldn't ever be able to kind of look at it and allow it and see what it's doing. So kind of embracing it with gratitude is a really great strategy, right?

00:41:30 Speaker_06
It kind of allows you to look at it and really deal with that belief and sort of ask the question, is it really useful to you? It's trying to help you, but is it really helping you?

00:41:37 Speaker_06
I think another thing I really love about this story is that by kind of putting that in Li Bao's words, that it's his thought, it gives you some distance from that thought yourself, right? You're able to think of it as like, that's a belief.

00:41:50 Speaker_06
It's not an objective truth about the world. It's a belief that I can sort of see the origin story and you can almost label it as sort of one of his beliefs, kind of it's your ancestral belief, right? It doesn't have to be yours right now.

00:42:00 Speaker_06
You can pick and choose whether or not it's right for you. And that's a sort of classic distancing strategy that you get from cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, folks like work like folks from Ethan Cross and so on.

00:42:11 Speaker_06
And so I think there's elements there that the science would really line up with that that's a great strategy.

00:42:16 Speaker_01
This is why it's always so great to talk to you, because you can take my crazy shit and give it some scientific veneer.

00:42:22 Speaker_06
It's true. That's what the researchers would say you should do anyway.

00:42:25 Speaker_06
The final thing I want to talk to you that I was really impressed with your story about failure is this kind of optimism that you brought to it, at least sort of in the end part of the process.

00:42:35 Speaker_06
And you talked a lot about trying to sort of embrace this whole situation with what you called radical optimism. And so I'm curious if you could define what that means and how it sort of played out in your story.

00:42:45 Speaker_01
You know, I don't, anybody listening to this, including you, you can fact check me on this, but my understanding, and really this comes from interviewing a guy named Frederic Fert, P-F-E-R-D-T, who was an innovation maven, or is an innovation maven at both Stanford and Google.

00:43:03 Speaker_01
And he talks about radical optimism as, you know, the idea that failure, and we talked about this earlier, is embedded in failure is progress if you are willing to learn from it. So you can launch a big project.

00:43:21 Speaker_01
And for me, like I just launched a big new project in the aftermath of 10% happier the app not going my way. And in my sanest moments, in my most radically optimistic moments, and this isn't like, This is not irrational optimism.

00:43:39 Speaker_01
This is radical optimism. It's actually evidence-based, fact-based, reality-based. I can tell myself the story that this thing may not work, but I will have made progress anyway because I will have learned for the next thing.

00:43:52 Speaker_06
I love that this comes from like all the Stanford tech folks, because this has been kind of an ethos that has never been kind of my MO, but seems to be an MO that really works if you judge from companies like Facebook and Google and so on, which is like move fast and break things, right?

00:44:06 Speaker_06
I'm cool with the move fast, like that kind of fits with my MO pretty well, but the break things, I'm like, oh, that, but it's like explicit in the kind of plan for how you live your life and come up with ideas and so on.

00:44:18 Speaker_06
And inherent in that is just the idea of what you were just saying, right? you have to break things to learn what actually works.

00:44:24 Speaker_06
If the thing just kind of works perfectly the first time you design it, then you haven't really learned much of anything in terms that'll matter for your kind of product working well or in the case of our own psychology for our own resilience moving forward.

00:44:35 Speaker_01
Yeah, I would say the one asterisk there is that In my understanding, at least too often in the tech world, they're breaking things and breaking people and acting, you know, maybe without the highest integrity sometimes.

00:44:48 Speaker_01
And so this isn't about and I'm not saying this to you. I'm saying it just to anybody who might be tempted to misinterpret. This isn't about.

00:44:57 Speaker_01
you know, just being a dick or, you know, or not giving a shit about other people or burning yourself out and other people out.

00:45:04 Speaker_01
It's really like moving fast and break things the way I interpret it for myself is a willingness to fail, a willingness to try things. And yeah, this is another Silicon Valley cliche that I like to fail fast, to try a bunch of stuff.

00:45:20 Speaker_01
and then pivot quickly. And there's just an enormous amount of resilience available to you if you're open to having fared.

00:45:28 Speaker_06
Yeah. And not to beat the crap out of yourself when you do that. Right. Because it's hard to fail fast if you're in the fetal position crying about what a loser you are. Right. Yes.

00:45:36 Speaker_06
The trouble with talking with you, Deanne, is that we cover so much ground that when I'm in the position of summing up, it feels like there's a lot to do.

00:45:41 Speaker_06
But I think first bullet point in my sum-up list is that you and I both screw up a lot, and we like to learn from our screw-ups and then share what we learn with lots of people. And so thank you for helping me out with that.

00:45:54 Speaker_06
But it seems like among the things we've learned is that failure, not as bad as we think, lots of benefits we don't expect. If you're feeling terrified about failure, that's probably just an affective forecasting error coming up.

00:46:05 Speaker_06
But if you need tips to deal with failure, self-compassion, the catch up of all self-talk strategies, it just makes everything tastier and better.

00:46:13 Speaker_06
We need a little bit of radical optimism so that we can kind of remember that failure is probably not just not as bad as we think, but also gonna be really helpful.

00:46:21 Speaker_06
And beyond that, we need some strategies to kind of really allow our negative emotions and to remember that it's gonna be okay. You're the career journalist, what did I forget?

00:46:31 Speaker_01
I think that that was a perfect sum up. And I would add very quickly, one other thing, you know, for people wanting to navigate failure successfully is make it a team sport, you know, have people you can talk to about it.

00:46:44 Speaker_06
Super. Dan, thanks so much for being so frank about your failure and for helping me be so frank about mine. This was an awesome episode.

00:46:50 Speaker_01
Thank you, Laurie. I love talking to you.

00:46:51 Speaker_06
And next time we're going to come back and talk more about well-being at work.

00:46:55 Speaker_06
We're going to focus more specifically on the recommendations that came out on World Mental Health Day about what we can do as individuals and maybe also as employers to make sure we're thriving at work.

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This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video, phone, or chat. Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations, Hesu Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy.

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I think a lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day.

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