How to Thrive at Work

give us purpose fulfillment and a sense of belonging. One survey by the American Psychological Association found that ninety two percent of us think that our workplaces should actively support our emotional well being. But that same survey found that one in five of us describe our workplace as being toxic. And what makes a job toxic, according to that survey,

those things like bullying, overwork, discrimination, and even loneliness. It's therefore no surprise that this year's World Mental Health Day was devoted to the idea of wellness in the workplace, and so in the last of our special World Mental Health Day shows, we're going to look at some recommendations to improve our happiness at work. Joining me again is

Dan Harris. You probably already know Dan from his podcast ten Percent Happier, but you should also check out the fabulous new community he's developing at Dan harris dot com. Aside from being a Titan of Happiness, Dan also has lots of workplace experiences to draw from. For our conversation today, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that it seems like work is just gonna be hard necessarily. There's like some situations at work that are

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

TikTok or whatever it is. You want to push it away, But that doesn't really work. It can work a little bit, you know, obviously we need stress relief. But honestly, the one of the great mechanisms, or one of the great ways to think about this, is that the only way out is through to feel the difficult feelings instead of letting them own you.

sitting in the chair, or sounds in the environment. Just picking something based in one of your senses that gets you out of the spinning thoughts in your head and into some sense based object of meditation. That's a technical term. Basically, it's the thing you're focusing on, your object. And then the third step is the most important, which is very quickly.

that's what the practice is. The sit try to focus on one thing very quickly, you'll get carried away and you start again and again and again. It's like a bicep curl for your brain, and it really changes the structure of the brain. It's so interesting that this is

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

just am simmering when I leave the office. I'm just like hating work. So she's going to sit down and she's going to meditate. What does she do with all those simmering feelings? What's the advice there?

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

eventually wake up. You might get carried away for a minute, two minutes, three minutes with a whole session, but eventually it's gonna end, and you're gonna wake up and realize, oh, this is just a set of thoughts with accompanying physical sensations that I can get increasingly familiar with, but they

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

of see your thoughts as separate. I've heard a recent one, which is to take the most annoying pop song that gets stuck in your head and then sing your thoughts to that song, which is or to watch your thoughts on big Star Wars fan watch your thoughts kind of scrolling up like the text of Star Wars, so it's

kind of going away. Yes, I mean, it seems like those techniques are doing exactly the kind of thing you're talking about with meditation, right, which is that you get some distance from them you can sort of see them as thoughts. But another way that meditation in particular, I maybe even more so than cognitive diffusion, can be helpful, I think, is to give some space to the simmering part that has to do less with the thoughts and

more with the emotions. Right. I know my friend from dealing with these job struggles as a whole host of sets of frustration and a shed of shame that she's kind of so pissed off at her job, and like a kind of uncertainty. Right, the sort of scarcity mindset that you and I talked about in the last episode. There's just a whole host of yunky emotions that come when you're experiencing some troubles at work. How can the practice of sitting with these emotions.

what's happening? What is this thing I'm calling anger? So it's a bunch of thoughts, but it's also maybe a burning in my chest, some heat in my ears, heaviness in my forehead, kind of taking with a seemingly solid, monolithic thing called anger and putting it through a cheese grater. Because you're picking it apart, you're disambiguating the constituent parts of the anger, and in this way it doesn't have

as much power. You can actually see And now I'm going to get a little bit mystical with you here, but you can see that to call it your anger is, in the words of one great Buddhist monk, a misappropriation of public property.

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

really tried to sit with certain emotions of mine. I did this recently with something I was experiencing a lot of sadness about, and I'm like, as much as I really deeply don't want to sit with this sadness, which is like sit with the sadness, and when you start, it can feel so intense. You feel like this is always going to feel this bad and this intense and this painful. And then like within four minutes of meditation,

my mind is wandering off to other stuff. But I quickly come back and notice like, oh wait, I'm not experiencing the sadness as as sad anymore. My brain is like in its stream moved on to something equally stupid and made me rumutative, but it's not the sadness anymore. And then I have this moment sort of shockle like, well that's weird. Like a few seconds ago, I thought

this was going to stick around forever. And so I think that's the kind of thing that I often get out of It is less the kind of making sure the anger is that sadness or whatever it's not me, because I struggle with that to kind of seem that it's not part of me. But maybe I should use this technique of there is sadness as opposed to I'm

super sad right now. But what I do often is experience is like, oh, this was not nearly as permanent as I assumed this would be, This was not nearly as intractable as I assumed it would be, and that that part's been really helpful for me.

my job. So when I wake up in the morning, I do this thing that if you told me fifteen years ago I was going to do this thing, I would have, you know, coughed my beer up through my nose. But I have this little thing I say to myself, which is my job is to make awesome shit that helps people do their lives better, and to work on the relationships in my life, including my relationship with myself. Those are my jobs, and to try to remind myself as much as possible.

rituals and practices to remember this. Because I thought you were going to say the hardest part is sort of, you know, kind of remembering to do it every day right where you have to kind of do it every morning. You've kind of put together these sort of tattoos that allow you to remember to do it. Every time you see it, You're like, oh, yeah, purpose. I thought it was just my Instagram numbers, but nope, it was actually, you know, for the benefit of all beings. That's why

I was doing it. So I think like the fact that you have this purpose is really important and meaningful. The fact that you remember to engage with it, But the fact that yours really is an other oriented purpose, I think gives it kind of special power and special weight.

You know, there's just lots of evidence that the typical way we think about what makes us happy, which is doing for ourselves or treating yourself or self care, it just doesn't do the work that we think, like the real kind of bang for your energy and your bluck in terms of like what's going to boost your well being is taking time to do stuff for other people.

I know on both of our podcasts we've talked a lot about the feel good do good effect right where it's just like, if you do stuff for others, you're going to wind up feeling better, And so making that sense of purpose not about you winds up making it easier to kind of engage with these things because then the parts that feel like it's about you, of like oh, your particular podcast numbers go down, or your talk didn't

go well, it's like it's not about you. Right, if that talk resonated with one person in the big audience, then check, you know, you've done your work for the day, you can kind of feel good about it. And so yeah, So yet again the science is taking off all the all the great advice you're giving us here.

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

I think the key, though, is that we have to kind of it's helpful to remember that the motivation isn't about us. I think when we get in the headspace of like I'm going to do nice things for other people and I'm going to do things for the better fit of all creatures because I personally want to be happy,

it sort of loses something. So I think really holding on to the motivation that like it's not about you can be a profound step for ultimately, in a very ironic way, it becoming absolutely about you and your well being and your happiness. And I think this is so true at work, right. I mean, most of our workplaces

offer lots of opportunities to do nice stuff for other people. Right, even if you're in the kind of worst capitalists sort of system, maybe you're creating a product that maybe somebody will enjoy, or at least you're making the shareholders some money, like they'll be happy. Right. I think we often don't frame kind of our success in business as being about

other people, but so often it really is. Whether that's you know, just for the guy who works next to you on your team and kind of making his life and his job a little bit easier. I think that can be really powerful because often in many jobs there are these cases where like they're not a lot of wins, or things are going bad, but you can also often do the one nice thing for somebody next to you.

You can often make their lives a little bit easier, and that can have profound effects on our own well being. When everything kind of feels like it's going bad, turning to doing one nice thing for somebody else and making their lives a little bit easier. That can often be a remedy that we don't often think about, but can be super effective at making us feel.

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

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

this makes me feel really crappy about myself. And I know this is something that you've tackled, and I know this is something that you have a specific meditation practice that can be really powerful for fixing over time. So tell me a little bit about that.

really started to laugh at this. It really is just an ancient program inside of me that is trying to protect me. It's trying to help me be more effective, but it's not the right way to be effective. So I kind of laugh at it and say thank you to it, but try not to let it own me. And in Buddhism, there's a specific practice for dealing with this. It's called Moudita m dta, and it's an actual meditation practice for which I believe there's been a non trivial

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

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

mine succeeds, a little part of me dies. It is it's so natural to be jealous, but there's a way to counteract that, and there's great joy in getting good at Moodita. What you want is to become the type of person who people love to call with good news.

but they intercepted it. But it's almost never true, and so just leaning into the reality and just laughing at the whole system and working on developing the opposite intuition can be very helpful.

with no downsides. Right. You know, the human mind sucks in part because we're constantly comparing our insides to other people's outsides, and that means we don't see the internal conflict that's going on and all the time with them, but particularly during moments of these so called successes you know, last time you and I were talking about your you know, so called career earthquake and all the stresses that you

were under when you're promoting ten percent happier. I have to say, as another person in your field on the outside, I didn't see any of that. If anything, I was looking at like, oh, man, Dan's got this cool company. It's going really well. Maybe I should have started a company. Why was I sitting on it? You know, he's doing so much better than me. Meanwhile, inside, you're not sleeping,

your hair's going gray, everything's going badly. And I think that this is something that the research bears out, which is that when we try to do these social comparisons, we inevitably are doing them wrong. One of my favorite studies that I tell my college students about brings college students into lab and has them guess how many good and bad things are happening to other people, So, how many freshmen are going to a cool party, or getting a really good grade, or going out on a date

with somebody they found really hot or whatever. And then they also ask the students how many times did this happen to you? And what you find is that the students are constantly fantasizing that all these great things are happening to other people, when in fact, because we ask them how many times they're happening to them, we have the actual objective data on how much this is happening,

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

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

be the one that put in that work? And that's actually something that I come back to a lot when I'm feeling, you know, really jealous of somebody you know, or sort of you know, feeling this at the gym the other day, whereas watching a colleague of mind is started going to the gym and they got fit super fast, and I was like, oh man, I'm feeling so jealous, and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. How many times do they go to the gym like

they're running this ten K? I don't want to run a ten k. It was like, Okay, they can have their gift because I'm not willing to put in the work that i would need to do to get that gift. And I think that can be the kind of thing that we see on the job all the time, Right, people are kind of getting these accolades at work. But we might want to ask ourselves a question, is that

worth my work life balance? Right? Is it worth kind of putting in that much time and energy and kind of emotional drama to kind of get the same thing that other people are getting. And when you ask yourself that question, sometimes the balance might suggest that accolade just isn't really worth it, or it's not really you in the same way that you might have expected when you were just kind of fantasizing with the usual version of social comparison.

I don't. I if you handed me that on silver platter right now, I wouldn't even though it probably come with a shitload of money. What that would do to my life is not worth it.

in bad situations at work. And I think we'll talk about this moving forward, that you really probably should be

thinking about leaving and so on. But if the leaving is just about this sort of fantasy life about this, like you know, the grass is going to be greener at this other place, it might not actually be worth it right, And so I think kind of trying to fight that cognitive bias and really do the hard work of simulating more accurately what things are like, I think that can help you not make the mistake of sort of jumping ship when that wasn't really what was necessary.

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

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

on this emotional labor. It feels frustrating, it feels should make you angry, it should make you kind of sad

that that's the state of the world. These are negative emotions that we might want to find ways to allow individuals to sit with and I think to give yourself the grace to recognize that those negative emotions are there and that they're going to necessarily affect your performance right to give yourself the grace that you need to be compassionate with yourself to kind of fight these sort of things.

We talked in the last episode a bit about some of Kristin Neff's work on self compassion, where recently she's just put out this new book on what she calls Fierce Self Compassion, which is this idea that like, if we're going to fight all those inequities you and I were just talking about, what we might need to do

is to be kind to ourselves first. That this treating ourself like a friend, which might sign kind of wimpy or sort of not embracing, you know, the kind of real, real, kind of inequities we face with the appropriate anger that's normative in those situations. What Kristin Neff would say is like, no, by treating yourself with kindness first, it can give you the sort of fierceness that you need, that kind of bandwidth that allows for that fierceness to sort of fight

some of these problems. And so yeah, I think those things are legitimate. We need to fix some of those. We also might need at the same time some individual strategies to cope with the negative emotions that come from that nasty stuff, so that we have the bandwidth to fix it down the line.

of yourself. But it's that's really not true. Like if you care about your colleagues and also managing work and balancing that with your home life, if you care about all of that, like it's hard to do that if you're a mess, you know, so you need to schedule and prioritize whatever self care it is that you know recharges your battery. That's not self indulgent. That's mission critical.

sure you're protecting your sleep. So first, maybe we walked through this a little bit last time, but can you share kind of what happened to your sleep during some of your recent career crises.

the hours leading up to going to bed. It can be helpful if you get direct sunlight early in the day. Exercise is very helpful in terms of tiring you out. So there are lots of tools that I think a lot of people are aware of.

probably the worst possible thing to be scrolling through. Often I'm using that scrolling as a way to kind of make my runative mind shut off. And of course it's really bad because Reddit's filled with all kinds of stuff that's going to make me even more anxious. Plus I'm looking at this blue light. Plus I'm sort of hyping myself up. So that's my technique. What do you actually do instead when the urge to kind of look at your digital devices sort of wins out against this sort of cultural wisdom.

to do some of the basic sleep hygiene. And more so that the two things that were very helpful for me. One is walking meditation. I often talk about seated meditation, and I've described some practices where you can sit down or lie down and do meditation. But a lot of people either don't feel like they have time for this, or if you have ADHD that you feel like you're crawling out of your skin. And so there is this very rich, multi millennia tradition of walking meditation, which I

will describe very briefly. And there are lots of ways to do this, but the way I do it is I sort of stake out a patch of land in my house, maybe you know ten yards. You can do this inside or outside, but you know it's nighttime and often in the winter, so I'm doing it inside and I'm just walking back and forth. It's a long trip

to nowhere. I'm walking back and forth very slowly. Now there's a way you can do this that's really really slow, that actually looks a little bit like paranormal activity or something like this.

times and starting again and again and again. And one thing that can help you stay focused on the sensations of your body moving is to use soft little mental notes like lifting, like lifting your foot, moving, placing, thinking, planning, just these little mental notes that and a lot of people think, well, I shouldn't be thinking in meditation, but

thinking is inevitable. You can harness the thinking process to get you closer to your direct sensory experience, and that's what these little mental notes do, and you'll get distracted and you start again, and you start again. The reason why walking meditation really helps side benefit is it you know, if you're tracking your steps, it will add to your steps. For me is that my anxiety and anger often manifests

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

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

That actually is one of the pieces of advice. If you're struggling in bed, get up and do something fun, read a book. Sometimes I'll even just like get some work done that I was worried about I wasn't gonna get done tomorrow. When I'm totally exhausted, I get into bed, and honestly, it is not uncommon that I get into bed and I start worrying I'm not going to fall asleep, and I do fall asleep. Yeah, because it's the necessary relaxation that helps me let go into this mysterious process

of sleep. So that's a long way of saying those are two hacks.

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

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

actually think giving yourself permission to fall asleep. Yeah, like I might fall asleep and I'm not going to struggle with it. Once there's no struggle, things can happen. Once there are no expectations, things can unferl.

things better. And for this reason, employers and managers have this big role in mental health, so says the folks

who came up with World Mental Health Day. And so I'm curious about, well, your ideas for better training managers at work to support mental health and in addition to just being kind of a general good well being mindfulness guru, I know this is something that you've thought a lot about in the organizations that you've run, about how you can be sort of the best, most compassionate boss that

you can be. And so tell me a little bit about how you've been thinking about that and any techniques that you've brought in to do that better.

have done a lot of work on this score. One thing I think about a lot. Is this term psychological safety, which is yet another of these terms that can sound kind of vague or gauzy or soft, but it really is a ton of hard data to show that this is the secret sauce. There was one big study done internally at Google that I'm sure you're aware of, where they were trying to figure out, like, what is the common denominator among the best performing teams in this huge corporation, And for a long time.

everybody feel included. Reward people who say the hard thing to me, Reward people who tell me when I'm screwing up. And I try to encourage my direct reports two tell me the truth, and then if they do, especially if they do it publicly, to call them out in a positive way and say so and so said did this very brave thing. And they told me that I was not expressing much gratitude to the team recently, and I really heard that, and I'm grateful to that person, and

I'm grateful to all of you, and I'm sorry. And here's why I wasn't doing it. And so really trying to go hard at psychological safety is a big thing that I've thought about. And another thing is working on my communication skills, and this is very much related. I have spent the last six years working with these two incredible people.

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

Once I reflect them into submission, and I say that with tongues slightly and cheap, I can then say the hard things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to hear. Okay, so I just threw a lot at you. How does all of that go down with you?

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

like oh, did I get that right? Or am I missing anything, they'll be like, well, yeah, you're actually missing this other part, which is and the second thing winds up being even more relevant, or it really changes your view.

It's a reason you didn't think about before, and so on, and so yeah, so I think this iterative process of making sure you come to true understanding and true listening can be so powerful, and just having like a kind of a really quick hack to do that is important because especially in busy situations, especially in sometimes high emotion situations or kind of high fear of failure situations, like the kind of thing we find at work, I think having one of these kind of quick go to hacks

of like, oh no, no, my assignment right now is to do the reflective listening thing. Let me make sure I did it right. It can just be the kind of go to that I think eases everybody's minds.

our spouse. Is so much going on an individual mind in a workplace, and then you are trying to communicate from your cosmos through this unbridgable divide of somebody else's cranium and cosmos, and to just honor how difficult this is and use tools that up the odds of success. I think it is a such a winning recipe, especially for people of power in organizations, because the way I think about it, and I've really tried to train myself that if there's a problem on my team, it's gonna

come from me. Ultimately, the fish is always going to rot from the head, and so I've really tried to develop the reflex of taking the full responsibility for whatever's going wrong on the team, hopefully not to take it too far because sometimes things won't be my fault, but generally speaking, given how power works, that it is mostly going to be coming from me. Just a great little phrase to throw at you and for your listeners, especially

listeners with power to contemplate. This comes from a great executive coach named Jerry Klonna, with whom I've also worked intensely for the last six years. This is a question to ask yourself once in a while. How am I complicit in the conditions I say I don't want? And as a manager, it's such an inconvenient question to ask yourself, but it really helps.

all this kind of stuff. There's a really great book by the social psychologist Vanessa Bond called You Have More Influence Than You Think, and she just talks about how we're just blind to the fact that our you know, mild suggestions come off as like incredibly strong demands that people are into years about in the bathroom because we don't, as a manager, maybe realize that we've said anything that

had that hold over people. And so I think that that question of really doing the reflection of could I see this from somebody else's perspective? Could I ask the question of, even if I don't realize it, what am I doing that might be contributing to the situation. It gives you a little bit of a like lens into that influence that you might be having, a lens into that complicitness that if you didn't take the time to do that reflection, you otherwise wouldn't have.

I often hear this framed both in terms of psychological safety, but also in terms of finding ways to create belonging at work, which just allows a sense of safety, a sense of trust more broadly, and so some of their recommendations are kind of about that of like what can you do to sort of focus on thriving and belonging at work? And I think a big one beyond just sort of communicating, is just finding ways to allow people to kind of connect on the job in ways that

we don't expect. One of my favorite studies looking at the power of belonging comes out of Yon Emmanuel Denv's work at Oxford University. He did this big study where he partnered up with indeed and got job data on fifteen million workers at over five thousand different companies to look at what promoted happiness at work, and what he found overall was that it was people's salary. It wasn't

having a good manager, it wasn't work life balance. Those things mattered, but the biggest thing that mattered the most is your sense of belonging at work, which was defined in sort of two ways. One is your sense of kind of meaning at work, like what I do matters to somebody, which ultimately is a question of like social connection and kind of mattering. But another one, which I didn't expect, was the answer to the question do you

have a best friend at work? If you said yes to that, you're much more likely to say that you're happy at work. And I think this gets us to it to just a thing that we forget is important for thriving at work, which is the kind of connection

that we bring to our jobs. You and I and our podcast have both talked about the importance of social connection, but we forget that like we're spending like half of our waking lives a third of our actual lives, if not more, at work, And so if we're not finding ways to build those big connections at work, then we're probably missing out on a lot of the possible, like opportunities for social connection that oftentimes people aren't getting elsewhere.

And so I think kind of giving workers the opportunities to connect is something that managers could do better, but also something that would help everyone thrive because a lot of jan Emanuel Denv's work suggests that like when you can allow for social connection at work as a manager, you wind up improving everybody's performance and actually ultimately making a company more money. He actually has data from this Indeed survey that connects having a best friend at work

to the stock performance of different companies. So companies that allow for more best friendships at work make the most money. And so I think this is another situation where it's kind of counterintuitive. You wouldn't think that that mattered so much for a performance, but ultimately it's the kind of thing that you do that improves performance but also makes everybody feel better when they're on the job too.

normal social connection that would happen in a meeting type situation. Right, So, if you're in a physical office and you show up for a meeting and everybody sits around at the desks, nobody is just like silently staring forward like you might do on a Teams meeting or at a Zoom meeting. You're kind of chit chatting like oh that's a nice shirt, Like oh, how is your weekend, and blah blah blah. I think we do that a little bit less in virtual environments because it's kind of just a sort of

strange environment. I think it's not as psychologically rich to have these kind of connections or the things you'd naturally talk about. But a lot of workplace psychologists who focus on social connection recommend start your meeting with ten minutes of that, it might feel like you're losing out on time and you're missing out in these important opportunities to

do the work of the day. But the data on best friends at work suggest that if you make those social connections, you'll wind up kind of the performance benefits that come with it. A second thing that promotes mattering is to really just kind of call out those moments where somebody does something great or somebody does something that you really appreciate. And this is especially true for the boss.

So you talked about kind of being grateful when people, you know, make the hard point or say something that's really vulnerable. I think expressing that really openly and especially point about gratitude is doing that in a way with reasons of why you appreciated it so much can be really powerful. So, you know, I just want to say

that I really appreciated when you brought that up. It made me think a little bit differently because the X, Y, and Z reasons and now it's actually going to cause me to do something different, and so thank you so much for bringing that up. That is just a subtle way of teaching people that what they did matters. If their performance did something it mattered to somebody else at the company. Another way to show mattering is just to kind of take into account people's day to days and

ways that you might not expect. I was at a kind of corporate talk recently where I ran into a CEO who said that she US is a strategy. It is a really much bigger organization than yours. It wasn't ten people, it was like two hundred people of writing down everybody's birthday and spending the first ten minutes of the day wishing whoever's birthday. It was a happy birthday via email. And in addition to just say like happy birthday, one thing about what they've done. You know, I just

want to say, hey, happy birthday. You know I noticed that you did well on the Q two orport. You know, it's great that you guys are put in so much work. Thanks so much. And what she said was that, yeah, it's ten minutes of the day that she could have started, you know, diving to the normal work stuff. But she'd get back at email from each of those people that got that birthday email that said, oh my god, you

made my day, thanks so much. Rights person's shock that the CEO of this big company knows her birthday and is saying something nice. Those are the simple kind of psychological techniques that make people feel like it mattered that I showed up at work today, Like my behaviors on the job are making a difference for somebody, maybe not like making a profit, but like people are paying attention. And I think those kind of expressions can seem silly

or they seem like they don't really matter. They're superfluous, and they take away from the real work that we have to do on the job, but psychologically that they're really important. They contribute to mattering, and they made people kind of feel like the work they do is kind of critical, that there's psyched to show up to work.

which is a tiny, tiny part of what Disney does. He sent me an email and I replied, and he replied, and I replied. We he actually took, you know, a non trivial amount of his time as the CEO of one of the biggest corporations on earth to really correspond with me about the birth of my child. And then I extrapolate from that to how often I failed to do that on my tiny team. And it's really a good learning for me.

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