Leah Weiss on the Power of Mindfulness in the Workplace

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Leah Weiss, pH D.

Leah is a researcher, professor, consultant, and author. She teaches courses on compassionate leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is a principal teacher and founding faculty for Stanford's Compassion Cultivation program, conceived by the Dalai Lama. She also directs compassion Education and scholarship at Hope Lab. Her new book is How We Work Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity and Embrace the Daily Grind. This episode is

sponsored by Warby Parker. Go to Warby Parker dot com, slash one you Feed that's all spelled out one you Feed to order your free home, try on kit hi friends some other ways that you can engage with us. You can go to when you Feed dot net and get on our email list. We send out a wonderful monthly newsletter as well as if you sign up now you get a paper called the Four Transformational Hacks that make Habits stick even if you've tried before and failed.

And if you're looking for a little bit more support in your life, go to one you Feed dot net slash Coaching and you can get more information about our coaching program there. And here's the interview with Leah Wise. Hi, Leoh, welcome to the show. Eric, Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called How We Work Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity and Embrace the Daily Grind. It's not out till March, but I think listeners are gonna love it when it comes out.

And a lot of what I like about it is it's not about having to change necessarily your job, although that could be part of it, but a lot of it is how do we find p send happiness right where we are? And I love that theme. So we'll get into all that in just a minute. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred, fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Yeah, I think this parable cuts right to the heart of the work that I do, actually and to my personal mission. Um, so I really appreciate it. The reason I say it comes right to the heart of it is because you know, many of us have heard about Darwin, and for most people, you say, what what did Darwin's philosophy boil down to? Say? Survival of the fittest and have ideas about competition that nature

selects for the most aggressive player in any situation. But what's interesting is that there's another side to that story, similarly to this parable that you were sharing, which is that Darwin was also very focused on this idea of sympathy or what we would call compassion today, and the virtues of that for species that are trying to survive, the ability to cooperate, the ability to care for and

successfully raise young um. And what we call this is the notion of dual drives, so that we all have both. Just like in the parable, we have um the forces of aggression and competition, and we have the forces of pro social and compassion in cooperation and basically um. You know, one of the biggest findings from research in the last thirty years is that the extent to which our social context influences the directions that we go, which of the

two we feed to borrow in the language of the people. UM. So, I think it's a really exciting topic to explore, and the research and the work that's being done on what is it that allows us to feed ourselves in our communities and our organizations, so we move in the directions we want rather than towards destruction. I love the way you said that. And you know Darwin was not really the at least what we think of a social Darwinism, right, didn't even come from Darwin himself, you know, it came

from Herbert Spencer someone someone after him. So I'm going to read a quote from early in the book because I think it really sums up what the book is

about and really puts all this in context. So it says, partly because work is where we spend so much of our time, and partly because of its nature, nothing provides more opportunities than the workplace for us to feel discouraged, disappointed, board overwhelmed, envious, embarrassed, anxious, irritated, outraged, and afraid to say what we really feel, like it or not aware

of it or not. We feel things at our jobs, and how we feel at and about work matters to us, to our families and friends who are impacted, to the quality of our work, and ultimately to the success of the organizations we work for. So that's a that's a great way to kind of sum up the beginning of the book, and really what you're after in the book

is anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I think that that passage really is the best summary um within the book of of what I think the opportunity is that for when we take the effort to use work and all of the challenges, there as the opportunity to to grow as in visuals and collectives. That's exactly what this book is about. And then getting into the

how do you then take all of that onto the past. Yeah, and the word is not in the title of the book, but a big part of the book is about mindfulness, right, So that's one of the key techniques that you're advocating, and you go on to say that it's kind of in paying attention to our experience of work, even when it's dissatisfying or disengaging or ambivalence, is really the first step to turning it around. And and so by bringing

mindfulness to work, we can transform it. Let's start off a little bit with you telling me how that mindfulness is going to help me change my experience of work. Absolutely, so, I mean, really it's the route in a lot of ways of getting right to the heart of the issue. We are at work because there's something we're trying to get done right that somebody somewhere wants to pay for or fund in some way. And if we can keep our attention, which many of us, let's get real, really

struggle to do. If we can't keep our attention on the biggest priority, if we can't keep ourselves focused and moving on what needs to get done, that has a real cost for our organization. We struggle with that. No one likes how it feels too at the end of a long work day to know that you haven't really accomplished what was most important. It's a terrible feeling, it really is. It's amazing to me how true that is.

How it seems like a lot of times in the moment, like oh if I just you know, I'm just gonna do something different, right, And but boy it feels terrible afterwards, Yes it does. And we get so habituated, many of us,

to the types of distance that grab our attention. You know, it may have started out that we sought the action to procrastinate something that we were maybe we didn't understand how we were going to do it, or we didn't really know what the goal was, or we didn't have the tools we needed, and rather than facing that head on, we just directed our attention elsewhere. And then it becomes

such a habit. We find ourselves incessantly checking our cell phones or social media or you know, the coffee break that runs on for on and on and on, or whatever our version, or just working but working on the wrong thing that's not the priority. You say that in mindfulness training, there is no separation between what is meaningful and what is mundane. Can you explain that? So, the way I define mindfulness in its simplest form is the

intentional use of attention, intentionally directing our attention. And if that's the training that we're working on, there is no distinction between whether we're training ourselves to pay better attention while we are, you know, working on a spreadsheet or creating widgets or having a conversation. Any of these are opportunities that we can use to leverage the neuroplasticity of our brains to be able to get better at unitasking.

Rather than supporting this illusion of multitasking which doesn't exist. There's only tasks switching and the costs thereof. So my point there is that we don't have to view the opportunity for our mindfulness practice to be the lovely meditation session we might have in the morning. It's actually equally an opportunity to deal with the thing at least want to do at work that day. Is also an opportunity to train. That was one of the things I really

liked about the book. You make a real point of this that meditation is great, right, But you've got a line in there you say, you know, an optimal intervention that no one in the real world can use is not very helpful. And not that people don't meditate, but a lot of people don't. And so you talk about a practice where we don't have to do something different, right, we don't have to add this extra thing into our lives. You say, we don't have to do something different so

much as look differently at what we're already doing. And then you say, I had plenty of time to practice, I realized because practice wasn't something I had to take time out of working, or mother and or living to do. Yeah, And I think that the tyranny of the should's for so many of us. We have long lists of things that we, you know, should be doing that you know, for ourselves, let alone for the people in our lives,

and then start looking at service and work. And if we make mindfulness another thing on a long list of shoulds, and then we're making choices like am I exercising and taking care of my body and I meditating and you know it's actually taking care your body as well taking care of my It just becomes crazy making. So what I really want to do is get out of this um setting impossible standards and try to understand the point

of mindfulness, which was never meditation. Meditation aims towards mindfulness, it's not its own goal, and I think this is something we've really gotten wrong in the translation process of bringing these practices into secular context. There's a lot of great stuff happening, but I think over prioritizing meditation and under prioritizing the action element has been a real issue

that I'm hoping to set straight right. Meditation is ultimately a tool to make the rest of our lives, at least in my opinion, better, and it's been one that's very important to me, and I always encourage people to try. But I agree with you that that doesn't have to be the only way of doing this, and you you bring up the Tibetan phrase take all of your life onto the path. You know this idea that we are able to be mindful anywhere we are. So what's the

benefit of this? So, okay, we're gonna be mindful. Boil that down to how that helps me. I've got a job and I go in and it thinks every day and I'm frustrated. How does being mindful help me to transform that experience? Well, this is the kind of question I would much rather people focus on UM than the tyranny of the should medicine, because there's a million evangelists or the data. I think that this is the right approach.

So asking ourselves what's going wrong in this job that I don't want to go to UM and using mindfulness

to just bring our curiosity to that question. It might not seem like such an attractive question, but you know, you're an experienced coach, and I'm sure in your work with your clients there's got to be this discovery phase that each person goes through where they direct their attention towards they've been avoiding seeing because it was painful, But that's the only way that we can then see what the problem is and see what the solutions might be.

So our strategies of avoiding are just leading us to being becoming more unhappy. Um and actually like biting the bullet and looking in our day like, okay, if I don't I'm dreading on the Sunday night blues every night of the week, um, really feeling that, you know, And then when we get to work, like, where are the points in our day where the dread or the anxiety really rises. Maybe it's not as pervasive as we thought, or maybe there's specific activities and just getting clear on

that then we can be equipped to take action. Yea. And I think that avoidance that you're speaking of. The other word that is often useful for me is resistance, right, And and I recognize that it's the resistance of something that often is a cause of a lot of the pain and same thing at work. It's it's not that the work itself is that unpleasant or difficult or all that.

For me. I mean, I've got a job in addition to doing this, and I'd rather be doing this, you know, the podcast in the coaching, but that job is pretty wonderful when I have the intention to not resist it. But when I get into a place where I'm like, well, I really wish I was doing something different, and like you know, then all of a sudden, it's that same job for me becomes very unpleasan and it's all about my level of resistance. Now, I'm not saying all jobs

that way. Some are probably lousy and certain regards, But for me, I've been able to recognize it's in the dislike of it that I have it from time and time is almost entirely self created. I think that's such a powerful point you're making, um, and that this mindset

piece of it is so important. And you know, one of the studies that I think is really interesting, there's a researcher, I mean Rasnovsky who teaches at the Yale School Management, and I write about some of her work in my book UM, and she does a lot around purpose at work and what you can do to cultivate a stronger sense of purpose no matter what your job is, even if you're you're not you know your work, you're not the CEO of your dream job, um, but you're

doing something that wouldn't have been your dream in your life, honestly, so she she looks at all kinds of professions UM and one of the studies I love where she interviews a number of UM the janitorial staff in hospitals, and she asked them questions around how do they perceive their work and within that job which was probably nobody's dream from the time they were a little kid. But it's dignified work, they have benefits, they're supporting their family, hopefully

they're in organizations that in these hospital settings. And there was a whole range of answers. So my point is some of the people said, yeah, I do this to pay the bills and the dignity reporting my family and my extended family. In many cases, other people said, you know what I actually view my work is instrumental to the care and healing because if I don't do my job, well, guess what infection is going to spread and there can be disastrous consequences. So they really view themselves as part

of the care team. People like that are more likely to then UM do what we call extra role behavior. It's their job to clean up the hospital room. But if they're there in the middle of the night and a patient um is awake and lonely like there's many stories of developing relationships a last after the hospital, say where people were so, you know, in these kinds of roles, and I just find that really inspiring. So if that is possible, then how can I do that? How can

I get more of that? How can we all do more of that? Our sponsor this week is Warby Parker. We'll be Parker was founded with the rebellious spirit and a lofty goal to create boutique quality eyewear at a revolutionary price point. So this is really cool. They have something called the free home try on program, So you go online. They give you a little quiz to you know, pick what you think you might like, which is very helpful for me because I'm not very good at this.

You order five pairs of glasses, they send them to you, You get to try them on for five days, and then with a prepaid envelope, you send them right back. No obligation to buy, but if you find the pair you want, glasses start at dollars. You can go to Warby Parker dot com, slash one, you feed and that's all spelled out O N E y O U F E D Another cool thing is for every pair you buy,

a pair is distributed to someone in need. They've got a cool iTunes app where you can take pictures of yourself and the glasses the different ones, send them to your friends and get them to say what they think they like. And then this is really cool. The name Warby Parker comes from Jack Kerouac, who was a hero of mine when I was a teenager, and uh two of his earlier books characters had the name zag Parker and Warby Pepper, and so that's where they got it.

They took the best from each one and made it their name. This is a really great way to get glasses less expensively and to find a pair that you really like that you have time to spend with and and know that they fit you and they feel right. So go to Warby Parker dot com slash one you feed to order your free home try on kit Warby Parker dot com slash one you feed all spelled out O N E y O U F E E D. And here's the rest of the interview with Leo Weiss.

You've got a line that says it. It doesn't mean that we all have to work for a good cause. It means we find the good causes all around us, the small opportunities for purposefulness, mindfulness, and compassion in everything we do. And I love that idea. There's another spiritual teacher that I like, and he talks about this idea of you know, we think of purpose too narrowly. We think like, my purpose has to be like doing this one thing, and if I do that one thing, then

it will be this expression of my values. And he sort of flips out on his head sort of like you're doing which is no. If you do everything with your values, if everything you do you bring your your values or what's important to you into everything you do, then you're creating that purpose right there out of everything. And that's essentially what you're driving at here. That's right, and that the trench, as you know, work as well as you know, how did that come alive for different people?

How do we make that something that is an exploration and an experiment that people feel like they can really engage in rather than another thing at the bottom of the long to do less right right? I often talk with people about you know, there's a lot of people who want to make career changes, and I think it

can often be a really good idea. And one of the things that I've noticed though that I wrestle with and a lot of other people do, is I think there's some sense like if I hate what I do enough right now, that will drive me to the next thing. And my experience has been almost exactly the opposite that when I hate what I do or when I have that attitude, I'm so drained that I don't have the energy to do all that other stuff, whereas when I put everything I can't into what I'm doing. Sort Of

it's sort of um nonintuitive, right. You'd think like if I don't spend so much energy on the job, then I'll have more energy outside the job. But my experience is it doesn't work that way at all. It's by by giving my all there that I'm able to come out and and not feel as drained and not feel as um beat down, and and then I'm better able to do all the other things in my life. Absolutely, what do you tell people when they're in that situation and they're hating their job and how to what are

some of the recommendations you get. I'm really curious to hear. Well. I think it's very similar to to what you're talking about. I mean, one is, if there's something else you want to be doing and you know what that is, then then let's explore that and let's let's chart a path towards it. But in the interim, right, how can you learn to care about what you're doing? How can you bring your values? You know, if we say that, I

think a lot of people we get dissatisfied. Like you said, you know, we think we have to work for a good cause. We have to do this, you know, this very important thing, right, and so we think until we do that very important thing, that everything up to that point is unimportant. And my experiences and I think that's absolutely not true. I think if our value, if the thing that drives us to want to do something purposeful to towards the good cause, let's just say our value

is we want to help other people. Well, in any job we have, wherever we are, as long as there's other people involved in any way, there's an opportunity right there to help other people. There's an opportunity right there to be kinder or better. And so you know, I think it's a multi step approach, depending on where somebody wants to go. But a lot of times it's let's re engage where you are. Let's try and bring your values into work that you do every day. Then see

what this job looks like. How does it feel to you at that point? But I mean a lot of it is very similar. It's why I loved your book. I was like, yeah, I really you know, I relate with a lot of this. I mean, I think it's very very well said. Thank you. So you say there are three types of mindfulness training that we bring into work. One is embodiment, the second is meta cognition, and the last one is focus. Can we go through each of those real quick? Absolutely? So. The embodiment piece is so

for so many of us. If we're knowledge workers, you know, we're spending our time in uh in, on computers and in meetings. That can be very easy to just feel like we exist in the top few inches of our head and we literally forget we have a body unless the body becomes like the traction from what we're trying to do. So, you know, we have pain or we have hunger, we have to use the restroom, then then

we remember we have a body. But you know, one of the really interesting changes we can make is to just try to not be disembodied brains and a vat as we go through our work day and bring our attention back into our physical sensations and experience of work, which can give us really important information. Um, you know about our jobs, about when we've been doing a trade for a long time. UM. We have all kinds of

intuition that contains knowledge and in our bodies. And there's great examples of even the economist Nobel Prize winner Um Conoman who wrote about intuition is recognition and the that

he describes that it's very much somatic physical recognition. He gives an example of a fire chief who um goes into a burning house and there's a bunch of his team in there, and he tells everyone to get out immediately, and they get out in the house blows up um in flames, and it was because he felt sensations on the top of his ear that he recognized and knew meant that was way more wrong in this house than anyone who is in the house and recognize. So it's

just an example. You hear people in all kinds of fields like finance, investing, engineers talking about how there's all this information in their bodies. But if we're disembodied in our work day, then we can't draw in any of that. So that's that's one way of thinking about embodiment and

the practice there is just practice bringing your attention. Can you do the same work while remembering that you are in a body while feeling sensations as well, paying attention to your posture, maybe switching up your work environment to a standing desk or different locations just to kind of keep yourself moving intermittently. All those kinds of good um work experience hacks that that people use we can use

in our mindfulness as well. Meta cognition is our ability to keep track of where our attention is while we're in a task. So this meta layer of you when I talked about mindfulness is the intentional use of attention. Well, the only way we can really do that is if we are both paying attention to something, like I'm paying attention to this discussion with you you, but I also

need to tracking on where my attention is. So if we're speaking through the mechanism of a computer, if my attention starts drifting and my screen saver, meta cognition is what allows me to check in like, is my attention where it's supposed to be um recalibrate when it moves off, which it will. So that's the second piece, the meta cognition, aware of where what we're thinking about, aware of what

we're aware of. Meta awareness is another term that sometimes is used interchangeably, just like the bigger trum and meta cognition, because awareness includes sensation as well as thoughts, you know, the cognition piece. And then the last one is focused, which is really I think super practical and so helpful.

Just you know. One of the ways I like to work with this one is just do little sprints in my day, like literally setting the timer for twenty five minutes and saying I'm going to mono task and work on X and it might take me a few different chunks, but using something like this, I'm referencing the Pomadoro technique of setting these short first, I'm a big fan of it. Yeah,

that's great, I mean, and it's how powerful stuff. And the other thing is it's not just helping us be productive, it's also helping us understand where the fifty other places my attention get its pulled during those twenty five minutes. That is super interesting. Yes, it is. I have found it to be so helpful. The other thing I found is like, how much I can do in twenty minutes if I'm completely focused only on one thing. But you're right, it is easy to get a lot of things come up.

I make sure I have a pad of paper with me so that when I get fifteen different ideas I'm like, I can just very quickly scrawl them down instead of what I normally do, which is like, oh, let me look that up on Google, you know, and then I'm off. And so yeah, it is a great way to work for sure. Yes, one of my favorite student papers I

ever read. Um, we were doing the mindfulness unit in the house I teach at Stamford and at the Business School, and a student was reflecting on his meditation practice that week, and he said, I had the craziest experience. Like I looked up and it was an hour and a half later than he had sat down to meditate. But he never consciously ended the meditation session even to say like,

I'm not doing this. Like. His point was that at some point while he was meditating, he had gotten the idea and he just got up and pursued it without having the metacognition that he was, you know, acting out an idea. Not that following your ideas is necessarily bad, but it was just this huge ah for him. And I loved just the earnestness with which he described that because it was so relatable, like exactly what you're saying.

I have an idea and instead of capturing it for a holding tank, I'm like, I'm googling it, or I'm switching to do that task or I'm doing ten and I don't even make that choice. It's just exactly happen exactly. And it's fun, sometimes in a slightly somber way for me to look back and be like, how did I even get to where I'm at? Like I'm I'm researching like drop shipping of like elephant food or something, and I'm like, what chain of events led to me being

on this web page? And I can kind of think about and be like, Wow, that was a whole lot of completely not really paying it to and into what I was doing and just chasing the next shiny thing. It's it really is kind of amazing, and that ability to turn things off and to focus, and there's I mean, there's tools out there which I've used before, Like, all right, I'm going to block the following six websites. I mean, like,

that's just what I'm gonna have to do it. It's embarrassing sometimes to be like I have that little control that I'm gonna have to do it, But boy is it, Boy is it helpful when I do absolutely absolutely, you know, it occurs to me as we're talking that it's like this, you know, when we're web surfing and how did we

end up on this site? But we can also like reverse engineer how did we get you know, during any little period of time, the number of just disparate thoughts that we're having, And it would be great if we could do a history on that, like we can on our web surfing. It would be a it would be

such an interesting exercise. Plus, you know, I feel like the other corollarya to this is like when we start realizing that that's what's going on for us all the time, and then we stop and realize what's going on for everyone all the time. That's you know, the people we work with, everybody at home, Like we're all we have all this much noise um in the background, and it's invisible. What's going on in someone else, but we know they've

got a similar dynamic. I feel like that's a real moment of common humanity or compassion that can happen patients, maybe with other people since I know, wait, I do the same thing. It's just part of our human condition, right. Well. I think they early on in the in the Web it was named very aptly when we talked about surfing the web. You know, it is that it is that sense of once you get up on the wave, right, you're not paying attention to much else. It just keeps

carrying you along. And and so I think that was a pretty um apt way to describe it from from way back when. And it's so much worse now, so much worse now with social media and Facebook and all that. But but enough of that. Those tools are also are very useful, and you know, the internet, we wouldn't be having this conversation of the show. So I'm not trying to say it's all terrible, but certainly can be a challenge for a lot of us. If you're enjoying this conversation,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We are nearing the end of it. I wish you could keep listening. Once the episode ends, well, I've got some good news to you can The interview continues over at one you feed dot net slash Support. There. If you pledge at the ten dollar level, you'll get access to this additional exclusive content, as well as many other bonus

conversations that have been recorded with our guests. We really need and appreciate your support, so we hope you'll head over to one new feed dot net slash support and pledge to access this additional weekly content. And now back to the interview. So I want to switch directions a little bit here before we wrap up, and I want to talk about over time in history, there's been there's been a discussion between sort of like a hedonic approach to happiness and a you're gonna have to help me

pronounce it. I've seen the word written a hundred times, but I don't know how to say it unimonic. Okay, I've got it with the you demonic purpose, right. So one says, you know, the way to be happy is just to string a ton of of good experiences together and keep stringing them together, and that's happiness. That's sort of the hedonic approach and the you demonic approach is really me more about what sort of meaning do I have in my life? And am I doing things that

I think are important? And it's a deeper um. Some people would say more solid approach. And you mentioned a researcher by the name is Steve and he does this. He does this study where he asks people about their happiness level, people who would be more of a hedonic style or more of a You demonic style, and he found that as far as purposes of self reporting, those people tended to say they had about the same level

of happiness. If you looked at them, you couldn't really tell it apart by their rating of their own happiness. But if you looked at things like inflammation levels, anti viral and antibody levels, all of that stuff, the people who had a You demonic purpose were in far better health in those regards than people that were sort of hadonic. And I'm assuming they know controlled for things like if

you're hedonic, you drink more alcohol or whatever. But but I just was stunned by that on one level, that our body knows the difference even though if our conscious mind doesn't. It makes me think of the episode we released. I don't know when this one will come out. But recently with Melissa Apple and I know you you mentioned that book to tell them your effect in your book, but it was another one of those where it's like our bodies know what's good for us a lot of

times better than our own conscious mind does. Yes. No, it's such an interesting point when they move in opposite directions. Our body and our own self report my own testimony to how I'm feeling, but on the on the micro level, the cells of my body are telling you a different story. And Elsa's work is fascinating. Yeah, I've asked, you know, a lot of number of different researchers how they make

sense of this. People working across the board in different bio markers um why this happens and what their their

thoughts are on it. I've had exhaustive conversations with Steve Cole about this, and you know, I think it's interesting because his path to to doing the research that he's doing now, he started doing work early in HIV and aids UM and trying to look at really questions of resilience and social isolation and loneliness ended up being really big factors, you know, and then which if you look at the flip side of that that comes back to

things like social connectedness and compassion and purpose and all these other positive psychology kind of areas that were interested

in in developing. I think it's a really exciting time for research um because we're able to quantify beyond the self report, and I think for a lot of people it is a motivator to understand the implications of what they're doing mentally on their body, whether it's introducing meditation or for people who aren't so into that, like the things we were talking about earlier, taking a good look at what is our mind set through our day and what are the opportunities to practice reframing yep, I agree.

I find that that whole study, or that whole area of study fascinating because it's one thing to talk about all these things that we we kind of believe our good for us and we hear a good for us. But it's really interesting when they're seeing it at a cellular level. At that level, it just adds another level of credence to what a lot of practices are. And I've said on the show a couple of times, you know, I love it when something that's sort of an ancient

practice that's been around for a long long time. So it's been around a long time. That means that there's something to it, right, and then that is also tied together with my own experience of it being positive and then scientific results that it's positive. It really gives me this feeling of solidity like, Okay, you know, this is something I feel like I can I can get behind because there's just so many different things pointing at its usefulness. Yeah,

absolutely know. I think it helps, and you know, it's definitely influenced my pedagogy. When the goal is to you know, introduce practices in a way people can engage with them. We want to understand how they're going to work and what the impact will be. I think the trick then is how do we get beyond thinking about it two then doing it Because the thinking about it isn't going to have the impact we're looking for, but it's an

important step. It's an important step, for sure, absolutely, And I think that that goes back to the earlier statement that you had about you know, an optimal intervention isn't any good if nobody does it. And you know that's another of the themes of this show. That comes up and shows up in the coaching work all the time, which is start small and build. Right. If you say I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna go from doing nothing to running five miles a day, it's not going to

turn out well in most cases. Um, And so we don't start with the optimal, but we can build there by by starting really small and and I think that's a key piece. So we're going to wrap up here in a second. But I wanted to end with a section where you talk about we all have somebody at work who drives us crazy, and then you talk about

well practicing compassion towards those people. All right, well, that's an interesting concept, but you've got a process in the book of sort of a way to think through this. So I've got somebody driving me crazy at work. How do I work on changing my attitude towards that person? One really simple assignment that a lot of people find useful. Um, I've been giving this for a number of years at the business school. And they all have to do team projects where they all share a grade, and many of

them really care about their grades a lot. And inevitably in any team there's a person who's you know, being bossy and taking over, or there's a person who's not pulling their weight and everybody has to compensate. The assignment is like pick someone you're working with, so you have to be interacting with them currently. And what I'm asking you to do, the only ask I have of you, is each day, I want you to think about this person in their full humanity in reflect and you can

do this. I give them a menu of options. Maybe it's picture them as a little kid um learning to tie their shoes, or picture their extended family and everything they've invested in them and how devastated they would be if anything harmed them, or picture them having had some

major disappointment. So taking any of this menu of humanizing reflections and just every day I want you to spend a few minutes to think about this person who's driving you nuts, experiment with this menu of reframes, and then I want you to come back in a week and just talk happen. So I'm not pushing you to like them.

I'm not pushing you to change anything behaviorally. It's just working on your own mindset intentionally every day with respect to someone you're dealing with, and the outcomes are unbelievable, you know, both in terms of sometimes it's the relationship.

Often it's just someone's insight about themselves, that they were triggered by something that really, um was disproportionate, or there was something they could do to impact the situation that they weren't seeing because they were so invested in their frustration and anger and righteous indignation. UM. So I love

that exercise. I try to do it myself, you know, with people that I struggle with, and if I have to interact with them, just even flash that kind of idea before we have our phone call or meeting, it can go a long way, or during it during the meeting, you know, just remembering UM and even you know, you can go a step further just asking a little bit about their life. It doesn't have to be a lot, but just enough to humanize and get out of our mental rut of of being stuck in seeing someone in

a way that doesn't serve us or them. Yep, I love that. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. The book was it's excellent. It comes out in March, so we'll have links to where people can preorder it. Depending on. This will come out before March, I would imagin jin, so I'll have links where people can pre order it. But thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure

me too. Bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One you Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.