Gabriella Kellerman || Future-Proofing the Workplace

Today we welcome Gabriella Kellerman to the show. Gabriella is the chief Innovation Officer at Better Up and the head of better Up Labs. She is also a Harvard trained physician with expertise and behavioral and organizational change, digital health, well be and AI. As a thought leader, Gabriella has been published in The Atlantic Scientific, American Mind, JAMA, and the Harvard Business Review. Her first book is called Tomorrow Mind,

which she co authored with Professor Martin Selgman. In this episode, I talked to Gabriel Kellerman about prospection and future proofing the workplace in the twenty first century. According to Gabriella, the twenty first century is always changing, and she argues that we can plan for uncertainty by cultivating creative leadership building, rapid rapport and learning resilience. We also touch on the

topics of imagination, kindness, and positive behavioral science. It was great fun to nerd out with my friend Gabriella about imagination, prospection, creativity and other awesome skills that I like to study as well, which we can refuse in the workplace to really help everyone deal with the growing and rapid uncertainty we're facing in our lives right now. So without further ado, I'll bring you Gabriella Kellerman. Gabriella Kellerman, so great to

have you on the podcast. It's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. So congratulations on your new book Tomorrow Mind Thriving at Work with Resilience, Creativity, Connection, Now and in an Uncertain Future. It's quite the sub title there. You co authored this with Martin Seligman Martin ep Selgment. How did that collaboration come about? Yeah, so, about five years ago, Alexi Robashow, the CEO of Better Up, asked

me to start better Up Labs. As you know, it's a lab where we are looking to develop and accelerate development of the knowledge base of how to build critical skills that we need to thrive in our personal professional lives today at the overlap of the dew And the person that I most wanted to work with in that endeavor was Marty. He's obviously been working on these problems his whole career. His writing and work's been influential for me, it's been influential for Alexi, for so many of us

at Better Up. And we made the pilgrimage out to Philadelphia to meet with him and pitch him the idea, and you know, I think he understood the potential for this to be what he calls the Bell Labs of Positive Psychology is still something we're trying to live up to. And we've been researching together ever since. Oh well, you said you've been researching ever since? What have you been researching? Yeah, So we in our lab, we have a we have

a whole research staff. There's about fifty PhDs at the company now, so bigger than a lot of academic departments. And so we do studies in lots of different ways. So we do studies in house with our own staff, We do studies in partnership with academic labs, like with Sonya Lubomirski. You had such a great show with her not long ago. And then we also help and you know, advise or share data with other labs for them to analyze themselves and publish on It's it's all part of

our mission. That's awesome. I feel like y'all are really interested in that notion of prospection. That's a core theme of this book. What is perspection? What is that? Yeah, so it's our ability to imagine and plan for the future, and it applies to our personal lives, applies to our professional lives, applies to individuals, applies to groups. Okay, so it's not the same thing as imagination. Imagination is a component of but you can have imagination without the perspection.

It's a great question. This actually a little bit of a debate that I think Marty has one view on, some of our other advisors have a different view on. And we think about it more is that what's the relationship between creativity and perspection? Is prospection a subset of creativity or is creativity a subset of perspection. We take the view that it's more the latter perspections the broader project of imagining all kinds of things and then taking action on it. And as you said, so imagination is

kind of the first phase of perspection. It's really quick, it happens on the order of seconds to minutes, and it's optimistic and divergent. And then the second phase of perspection is more deliberate, more valuative, takes longer, can be more pessimistic. So for some of us, getting better at prospection is about the first phase and learning to live and tolerate ambiguity a bit better, learning to think more

expansively and divergently. And then for others it's more about in the second phase, how do we improve our accuracy of planning for obstacles that can come. You say perspection is the twenty first century superpower. That's a bold statement. That's a bold statement. What do you think it is about particularly, and I know your context is in the workplace mainly in this book. What is it about the nature of the workplace in the twenty first century that

you think really requires perspection? Yeah, so it's become a platitude to say that the pace of change is one of the defining features of our era. But it is. Change is happening all the time, and faster and faster. Part of what we're trying to help people do is internalize that, understand what does it mean to accept that, and then to depart from there on your developmental path. It's not about getting through any one change, it's not about any one critical moment. It's about all the moments

that will come. And perspection is part of what allows us to yes see ahead, not as much in a future a sort of a future telling way, but more in a way of being able to imagine lots of possibilities and being positioned to respond to them in an agile manner. The more opportunities we can imagine and position ourselves for, the better able will be to respond. So it's part of the project of trying to restore agency

in this time of tremendous uncertainty. So you think that in order to kind of future proof the workplace will require this flavor of prospection that's agency oriented, because it is that your flavor of perspection does have this agency or flavor to it. You know, it's not the just freewheeling daydreaming that sometimes I talk about, like positive constructive daydreaming. Yeah, no, I love that too, And creativity we treat as its own kind of skill and superpower. There's sort of five

skills in the book. We are originally going to write the whole book on prospection though, and you're right, it is very much of primary interest and it's something that grows tremendously during coaching. So of all the things that we measure when people go through coaching, perspection moves most dramatically, most quickly. And we're very oriented toward what are things we can build. We know how to help people build

that will help us in this era. So there may be other things, right, but if we can't help people build them, that's not where we're going to focus our time. When it comes to creativity, what is this novel typology of creativity that you present in the book. Yeah, so it's a way of thinking about different ways of being divergent. So we often talk about activity as divergent thinking, but

what does that mean? And part of our goal is to help people identify with the label of creativity, even people who have never thought of themselves that way before. So we want to give really concrete examples and group them into categories that people can identify with. And I think part of what we heard early on in developing the typology and what we're hearing from the article. Since it's been out, it's really gratifying to hear people say, oh,

identify with that type. I didn't even know that that's a form of creativity. And to start to open up that sense of identity and creative self efficacy, it's part of what we hope this can accomplish. It's also a great tool for leaders who are leading innovation teams to be able to say, Okay, in our portfolio, we tend to do integrative innovation. We tend to do splitting innovation. Do we have enough distal thinkers in the mix? Do we have enough individuals who are doing good at figure

ground reversal? We challenge ourselves to think in all four of these dimensions and come up with ideas, and it's a way of encouraging different forms of divergence. Did you mention all four? Yeah, so there's integration, splitting, figure ground reversal, and distal thinking. Splitting doesn't sound good. That sounds like a worline person. This, No, what do you mean by it? Yeah? It was not I meant to be defined by the DSM.

So splitting would be taking a construct that is normally thought of as holistic and showing how it can be more usefully divided into parts. It happens a lot in the land of product. You might launch a product and gradually discover actually, this is more effectively divided into these subtypes. To recognize that, to understand that there's room to optimize it into potentially very different types of products. Is it's

its own kind of innovation. It has a lot of overlap with analytical thinking, but the analytical thinking can happen at you know, a really a micro level, and this is more at the level of an idea product that you're putting out into the world. Well, I love I love this breaking this down into different types of diversion thinking, because yeah, you're quite right, the field of creativity does tend to just focus on one kind of creativity diversion thinking,

like how many uses are there for a brick? And well, what is creativity hygiene? How does that relate to diversion thinking? Yeah, let me tell you about that. And I'm curious what you what you think of the idea of creativity hygiene. So one of the things that I love about studying creativity, which is also what makes it so challenging, is that

there is a non conscious component to creativity. And you know, as researchers in brain sciences, we're not supposed to talk about unconscious things, right, but there's a lot of what we do that we don't have conscious control over. And it's clear from the literature that at least some of what determines creative output we don't fully have conscious control over.

And so if you're trying to then give people guidance on how do you optimize for something that is not entirely under your conscious control, one analogy that comes up for me is to sleep. Sleep is something that's really essential for us, but we can't just you know, snap our fingers and be asleep. And so the field of sleep hygiene originated from the same set of challenges, how do we help people organize their life and their lifestyle

to optimize for this non conscious outcome. And so we're trying to do the same with creativity and say, okay, we know it's this default mode network that's going to provide a lot of the rich inputs for this creative output you're going to bring. We know that there's all of these ideas about the kinds of exposures that highly creative people have that feed the default mode network. How can you orient yourself around things like novelty breaking routine

as a way of feeding that default mode network. How can you you also learn to tolerate ambiguity more so that perhaps you can extend the time that you spend again in that phase one, in that more expansive, divergent phase. We also try to help people understand what effective incubation

periods look like. So, as you know, when we're working on a creative problem, it's helpful to intersperse active, kind of conscious executive control type of work with this day dreaming type of work, and that's the one we have

less conscious control over. But some of the great studies on how that incubation period works most effectively also suggests that it's good to be doing something while you're incubating, but not too much, right, so it's not sort of just lying in your bed, but it's also not sitting

and answering emails. And so how do you dial in those incubation periods with activities like taking a walk or taking a shower, things where you're on sort of autopilot doing something that you're allowing your brain to be working on those things in the background. We don't necessarily have a clear concept of what's that like, just right enough level of attention for an incubation period, and that's what

helping people dial in. Oh great, I know that. When I was working with Marty, he was a really interesting idea of the sense of the audience as an important part of the creativity. Is that part of creativity hygiene as well, or maybe it doesn't quite fit. We definitely include the utility to the audience and the definition of creativity, so we use that and novel surprising and useful, the last one being the sense of audience, but we don't

necessarily embed that into the hygiene component. Yeah, okay, yeah right. I was like, where does that fit? Yeah? Oh gotcha. So I love in your book how you connect this to creative leadership. So can you tell our audience a little bit about what creative leaders do? Well? You know, I think I think that a leader of great creative teams, they may themselves be greatly creative, but we try to focus on what does it mean to lead a team

and help bring out creativity from a group. So much of creative output today, all the most important innovations of the last you know, I would argue fifty years have happened in groups. We're sort of beyond the day of the solo inventor in a garage somewhere, and so how do you bring together groups to do that effectively? And there's many, many challenges to overcome. Some of what we're suggesting is kind of small at the one on one level, and some of it's more the systems and plans and processes.

One of the components that I try to talk about as much as possible because it's so powerful and also so simple, is this idea of creative self efficacy, which, as you know, is our self belief that we are creative. Whether it's a teacher or a manager. People who are in positions of power in any particular way with respect to us have an outsized influence on our self perception

as a creative. And so teachers, managers, organizational leaders, when they can notice that you've done something creative, when they can recognize it, even if it's something very small, it helps build up self belief in ourselves as creatives, and that in turn influences greater, richer creative output for the

team for the good of the organization. So you're helping your individuals on your team when you notice these things, when you call in and recognize creative output, especially from people who don't think of themselves as creative, help them build that up and you'll see returns in terms of what they're able to put forth. I see your coaching expertise come into the mix here with you. Know, there's a big concept in the coaching world called strength spotting,

and you're talking about creative strength spotting. I love the contribution you've made to this book, Gabrielle. I think we need to give you some credit, give you a lot of credit. You know. I've mentioned Martin Sulligan's name a lot because he's obviously a giant in the field. But you should really be commended for the contribution you've made in your own sort of major contributions to this book. So I just want to make that absolutely clear before

we move on. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely, Well, you know, what are some mistakes that a company can make that can throw a creative team off. I think that's a really important thing to discuss as well. Yeah, so how do we manage risk? And part of that is how do we manage quote unquote failure of creative efforts? Is

a huge part of where things can go wrong. So we need to be able to tolerate as individuals, as teams organizations a certain level of risk if we're going to get to major creative output, and that entails having a portfolio, and some of the things in that portfolio are going to fail in the sense that they're not going to be the thing that makes it to market, or it's not going to be the solution to the problem.

Being able to recognize those efforts help people understand those efforts still matter not have consequent negative consequences as long as the efforts were done well and in good faith, you know, not punishing people for risks that didn't pay off.

Those are all places where companies can go awry and send messages that are It may feel to a leadership team like a whisper, but it will come through like a megaphone to the front lines in terms of what it's telling them about their own lack of safety as innovators. So that's somewhere where we have to be extremely careful. It's also a great place to focus efforts and to focus the way we think about culture for the organization

as a whole, because when you do it right. It sends a beautiful message, and you know, you see this beautiful coming together and openness and suggestions of ideas that wouldn't have otherwise come up. Nice well said, Well said, you mentioned safety a little bit, and well, I think that a lot of what you're saying right there links to the idea of the need to matter right in some way as well, to feel safe to matter. I've

never quite put it that way before. A workplace where you really self actualize, and you know, real self actualizing workplace is one that really appreciates that mattering drive. Do you bring in Isaac Polteonski's work at all in your thinking about this, No, we don't. You should. He's such a legend in the field of positive psychology and in

understanding the need to matter. And what I really like about his approach is he really acknowledges that not everyone is coming from the same level of privilege to show to speak. And I see that as something that I never seen already talk about ever know how to put this, you know, I just don't see as in positive psychology much of an acknowledgment, you know, when they when there's a discussion of agency in the field, I don't see much of acknowledgement that, like, well, some people in our

world maybe matter too much. Some people don't even get the chance to matter. So that's why I really love his framework. So I just encourage encourage that to be brought into this discussion. I mean, I think it's a great point, and even in the broader so we think of mattering as a subset of meaning and purpose or a more actionable way of thinking about meaning for the organization in the broader conversation and meaningful work. I think this a hugely important point is to what extent is

it a privilege to expect work to be meaningful? To what extent is it a fair expectation that put out into the world for people who are, you know, agricultural laborers and maybe would not choose to be that if

they had an alternative. And I think these are really important questions, and there are a wide range of responses, including people who would say, absolutely, you know, you're doing folks a disservice by saying that just because they're from a lower socio economic status they shouldn't be able to find meaning in their work. And then on the opposite end are folks who say No, it's just a privileged

concept to begin with. But I agree it's a very important component of the of the conversation, and that meaning is one of these areas where we can't be culturally sensitive enough around where do we find that in our lives, in our work lives and our personal lives, and what assumptions are we making about what it could or should

be for anyone else? Yeah? Absolutely, I mean, just to be clear, I'm not trying to go to Wokeville here all of a sudden, But the idea of agency, I think there's something that I can call toxic agency, you know, That's how I would label it. I think that toxic agency would be treating agency as though that's the only thing that matters, and that people don't have any constraints at all on their environment, you know, like and just

ignoring all that I would say as toxic agency. I also think that toxic agency can be like a situation where a leader matters too much, you know, like a leader has all the power right and no one else has had any power whatsoever. I also see that as toxic agency. So I don't think like agency in and of itself is necessarily a great thing for Marty, so much of it started for him with the learned helplessness studies, right, and the ways that we yeah and learn our sense

of agency and pathologic ways. And so I think part of wanting to give people agencies that it's also about how do you restore it to people who've had experiences that where they felt victimized and they no longer feel access to agency. Agree completely, there's you know, neither extreme is where we want to be absolutely absolutely. Maybe we can back up a second, you give me a little bit the history of the behavioral sciences. Why is this

the world we're living in right now? You know, how is the approach that you're putting forward different from maybe the medical model of psychology or psychiatry. The world of science that we're advocating to be used to be better distributed and applied in our daily lives. And we're talking about adults, but there's so much of it for kids too. It's also a passion of mine. We can roughly call them the positive behavioral sciences, banning psychology, neuroscience, even psychiatry.

There's positive psychiatry now, and it is very different from the pathological model of the behavioral sciences, which took as its focus how do we heal people who are psychologically unwell? And even when I was training, the idea is you study people who are psychologically unwell to help them right,

to really help them with their tremendous suffering. But also you hope that in doing that you will discuss were principles that you can then apply to people who are not necessarily unwell, but could their existence could be improved and they could help you achieve their potential and et cetera. And at a certain point for psychology is probably the

early nineties psychiatry, it was more like the Oughts. There's this realization that, hey, this is not all adding up, Like we've hit a wall in terms of how much we've been able to move the needle on rates of psychopathology. We've hit a wall on the level of symptomatic improvement we've been able to give for folks with psychological illnesses. And it has not translated into a science of well being.

And as you know, it's not the first time that there's been attempts to study a science of well being. Maslow and the topic of your beautiful book did this so well, but it didn't take off as a science, in part because it became so popular, and then it sort of got swept up in a bit of the woo woo, the hippie and self health movements, which didn't have to impede didn't have to impede it becoming a science,

but it did. Whereas what Marty and others she'd sent me high, Sonya, so many other legends who really built positive psychology said no, this has to be a science. There's a lot of great quotes from Mike do you sent me high? About this? And it's only going to sustain and be applicable and have the impact if it

remains a science. So of course you can get a PhD. Now you have to learn statistical methods to call yourself a positive psychologist, similar training to any other kind of psychology that you would do, but with a focus on the life well lived. Very simple, succinct way to put it is, think about historically, most of psychology and psychiatry, if there's a number line from a negative ten where you're very psychologically ill to a positive ten where you're

thriving and doing amazing. Most of the behavioral sciences were focused on how do we get people from a negative six to a negative three, whereas positive psychology is more about how do you go from maybe a negative one to a plus three or a plus one to a plus five. How do we really optimize the life well lived?

The life well lived in the workplace, which is the focus of our topic today in particular, I'm right in saying that this book is sort of like a Schmorgus board of things that you think are necessary to future proof. So we already discussed perspection. I want to like put some structure to this interview somehow we talked about creativity, resiliency, rapport, this throwing all sorts of things I read from your book. What you tell me what the actual technical five are? Yeah,

no problem. So the acronym's prism, so P, prospection are resilience, I, innovation, S is social support and the particular lens we have on social support is what we call rapid rapport. And then the m is mattering. Amazing, So already today we've discussed more. We discussed mattering, right, we discussed what haven't we discussed? Well, I don't think we've gone into resilience as much as I would like, So can you please tell me some of the key drivers of resilience is

particularly in the workplace setting. Yeah, so you know, resilience means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There's lots of definitions floating around. Our approach is to say, what do you need to have in place in order to see resilient outcomes. So resilience is sort of a way of showing up. That's the outcome of having different psychological capacities and skills available. So in our data, we found five key drivers of resilience and

each of them can be built and developed. Here you go. Some of them people are strong at. Some of them people need to work on it. It's different for each of us, and so part of the hope is to encourage people to take a really personalized approach to what it means to build resilience for you. So here are the five. Number one, emotional regulation. Got to be able to acknowledge, identify, experience the emotions and then take a step yourself, reappraise, decide what you want to do while

not being overwhelmed by the emotions. So that's number one. Number Two cognitive agility, which is the ability to rapidly shift between sort of a horizon level scanning of opportunity and a very focused dive where you identify you need to go deeper. It's about being able to shift back and forth between them rapidly. Number three is self compassion. So when we hit challenge, are we able to express compassion to ourselves the way that we would to someone else.

It's very soothing, helps us tremendously put things in perspective, makes sense. It drives resilience self efficacy. So this is now generalize self efficacy, not creative self efficacy. Do we have self belief that we can get back up? Do we have self belief if we try something we can succeed at it? And optimism, so the tendency to imagine

a positive outcome in the face of uncertainty. It doesn't have to be unrealistically optimistic, but it is good for our hearts literally, our hearts, our brains, our bodies to be able to think optimistically. Cool. Yeah, those are great, and they dovetail nicely with the work of George Bonano at Teachers College and his book The End of Trauma. He talks a lot about the major markers of resiliency, and a lot of those overlap and particularly that flexibility mindset.

I mean that's very general. Talk to me about the workplace in particular, what can managers do to instill that Our science comes a lot from studying coaching. Coaching is a tremendously powerful way to beld resilience. Now, not everyone can afford a coach, So let me just break down some of the factors that I think are really important about coaching that can be expressed in other ways in

your life. Coaches are very personalized to you, So to learn these things, you want to do it, as I said, in a way that's focused on the areas that you need to focus on and also acknowledges and honors your strengths.

Because let's say I happen to be really good at self compassion if I'm going through a difficult time, to know that that's something I can actively proactively lean on for myself is something that's going to help me, just as it will help me to know, like, hey, I could use some work on emotional regulation when I'm not in a moment of crisis. That's where I'm going to spend some cycles on myself, with my coach or on

my own. The second thing about a coach is accountability, so they're really great at helping people stay on the path of change that they're committing to. You can have a friend be an accountability partner. If you don't have a coach, you can have a manager, a colleague. There's other ways to access that for yourself. And then you know a third pieces that's really valuable to have another human along with you for the ride. Coaches aren't amazing

at that. Again, to have it be a friend or a colleague, someone you could just talk to about what you're going through, someone you can kind of hear yourself be vulnerable with. There's a power to that as well. There's also lots of exercises that are available freely. You are so much of an expert's god in these positive interventions, but they really help with a lot of these drivers.

So for example, the gratitude letter, the gratitude visit, which most people know about ways of teaching yourself to become more steeped in gratitude. Those things build optimism and in turn resilience, and so there's an abundance of these kinds of exercises. They're really well done with a coach, but you can also do them on your own as a leader, first and foremost important to have an accurate sense of your own resilience, because we know that leaders who are

more resilient have more resilient teams. Their teams are less burned out, their teams are more innovative, their teams are more productive. So just by working on yourself, you can

actually have a downstream effect on your teams. And it's quite a large effect, which is hard to believe when you say it in words, but when you think about your own experience of previous people you've reported to, if they were less resilient, if they were less emotionally regulated, if they were less optimistic, probably was not great for your well being, and they probably not someone you wanted to work for for a very long time. So there's an experiential truth to it that we see born out

in the data. And then in terms of what you can do to actively instill it for your team, there's a lot that you can do to bring in some of these practices to your team meetings, to your team processes. Gratitude's a great example. Can you open team meetings with gratitude doesn't necessarily have to be to the team. It could be express so gratitude to someone in your life

right now? How can you model that and build it into the fabric of your The way your team treats one another, the way your team goes about marking milestones, There's a lot of opportunity to actually build those exercises, in those habits into your day to day work with your team. Yeah. Well, I should have started off this whole interview a little bit by saying who are you? It's better late than ever, but can you introduce yourself to our audio, our international audience. People listening to you

all from all over the world. They want to know who's Gabrielle Kwerman and you know what, what does she do with better up? Yeah? Sure, so I am Gabrielle Eris and Kellerman from Berkeley, California and always been passionate about the science of thriving. That's what I've devoted my

whole career too. I started as a research psychiatrist, so clinical work and doing fMRI research, and pivoted into Behave Your Change in behavioral health technologies as a place where I saw greater appetite for innovation, for interdisciplinary thinking and an opportunity to move faster One of my most important role models is my father, who's a scientist who's devoted his whole life to the problem of fusion and making

energy from water from hydrogen. After fifty years, his lab had a major breakthrough that made the news just last week. How was your father? Oh? Wow, I mean that's pretty huge, pretty huge news. It's amazing he's alive to see that. I could talk about that for in, you know, many hours, But I do not have the appetite to work for fifty years on you know, in his case is small part of that one problem. I want to see results

more quickly. And so this place that I've found in technology, where we can rapidly experiment and and get new interventions out to people is a place where I found a good fit for my temperament, for the way I like to think as an integrator across lots of different fields, and a way to access a lot of people quickly, so when you do have an innovation, you can get it out into the universe into people's hands quite effectively.

Is that what you like most about coaching? When I decided to devote my life to helping people thrive, there were two polls. One was a very intellectual pull the brain is fascinating to me. I could geek out on the brain all day long. I get chills when I learned something new about the brain me it's the ultimate mystery. And then there's a really emotional side to it, which is it's always been very meaningful to me to help

people get through something tough that they're going through. One of those people that you know, I feel honored that people come to me to talk about things that are hard in their lives that they're going through, and so I knew I'm wanted to lean into that ability to help people one on one. In psychiatry you get to do research and help people one on one. In the world of coaching that I'm in, you get to do

research and help people one on one. So that combination of the one on one connection and the opportunity to actually impact at scale is where I find a very happy place to sit in the middle of the seesaw. Yeah, and you really are making a big impact. I mean you're you're like high up in the better up organization. Here. Let's like not sell you short. What's your technical title? Chief innovation officer, Chief innovation officer, Come on, don't let's

not let's let's let's be honest. You're you're you're very high up there in that organization, and you're really impacting a lot of people that you work with there and a lot of people that you influence. You have. How many coaches are there in total? It better up? Right? Now? We have about three thousand coaches globally. Whoa, it's through. I thought it was two thousand. You all are growing. I have such a love affair with the company. Better up. I don't know how else to put it. I really

respect everyone there so much. It's very mutual. We love working with you. Well, that's good to hear. It's good. It's mutual. It's good. Okay, great. I'm glad that we got a chance to know a little bit more about you and how you fit into all these pieces of

these puzzles. I want to talk about a topic rapid rapport, that you bring up in your book, because I think that that is a big barrier these days, is that people are so cynical, right like these days, like people are so distrustful, and I see it in the air, and I see it on Twitter. Maybe it's just Twitter, but is it happening in the workplace as well, and how can rapid rapport help. There are so many barriers

to deep and authentic connection at work. Certainly the technologies that we have can do quite a lot to divide us when they're supposed to actually be facilitating collaboration. We don't have a lot of time to communicate with each other. We're separated in space are our teams are always forming and reforming and shuffling. So just as you get to know someone, you're no longer working with them, or they move to another company, And then there's all the dimensions

of difference that we need to navigate. So obviously racial, ethnic, cultural, religious difference, functional difference, So sales and marketing can feel like different teams. Sometimes my company versus your company. Even when we're navigating a partnership you or my customer customer versus service provider, that can feel like an US them

type of situation. So all of these dimensions of difference that mean that to some extent the people were spending our time with, our brain is initially processing as a stranger is a significant a significant brain barrier that we have to overcome alongside the barriers of time and space. So what we try to introduce is what do we know about the science of essentially short cuts for all of those barriers, So what are the ways of building

trust quickly effectively? How can we overcome consciously these this processing of others as strangers, as people who are different across any of those dimensions, And how can we feel close to one another even when we're not in the same office working together, at least not for long periods of time or the answers to all those questions read the book. Read the book. The book is the best place to start, but I can give you a few

of the dimensions of what we cover. So one piece of the research that I think is really important and was a lot of fun to learn about for me the first time that I was exposed to it is through the lens of time. If you look at the profession where the barrier of time interfering with our ability connect is probably the biggest problem, I would argue, it's

in medicine. So there you have who are treating people, sometimes with life threatening conditions, and they have fifteen minutes to spend with them, right, how do you do that in a way that elicit's compassion? How do you do in the way it makes that person feel connected, that makes them trust you and want to follow through on the things that you know could actually save their life. And so they've done these studies on doctors, and what do you have to say? Is one question? Right, So

what's kind of the right script? And it's nothing earth shattering, it's I'm here with you, I care about you, we're here together, I'm with you, those kinds of things that you would think of naturally. But also how long does it take to get there? How many times do you have to say that? How many seconds, how many minutes? And what they've seen which is so amazing is that even increments of ten seconds of compassionate statements can meaningfully

impact the patient's level of anxiety. It can take a minute or less to say what you need to say to a patient to get them to a better health outcome through those statements of kindness and compassion. So one of the big learnings and what we try to get across in the book is we don't accurately predict how long it will take, and so we might not say anything like that at the end of a call with someone, at the end of a meeting, at the end of

an interaction. The whole call may be three minutes, and so we might think, oh, it's to say something meaningful and connected, I'd have to stay on twice as long, right, But actually just ten or twenty seconds of Hey, this was great. I know it's hard right now, we're here together. It builds over time and it matters. Another piece I'll mention as a quick tip is and this was some research that we did with Sonya's lab at you see Riverside Sonya Lubomirski and we looked at so for a while,

and this was such a fun study to do. We just paid people all around the carey to do kind acts for other people, and we looked at what dimensions of those acts were most likely to produce positivity resonance, which is Barb Fredrickson's idea of a very deep and embodied feeling of connection. She even calls it a feeling of an embodied feeling of love. So, which of these different types of acts, whether it's a email message to someone, giving someone a gift, paying someone a compliment by a

video message versus in person versus by phone. Crunched all the numbers and one of the most important distinctions was whether the act was done synchronously versus asynchronously, So whether it was by phone, by video, or in person. To have shared time together made that act much more effective in getting to a sense of positivity resonance than to do it asynchronously. This is a big aha for us at work because we do so much asynchronous communication, and

so it's just a check on yourself. Are you relying on the asynchronous to build relationships or are you actually picking up the phone to call someone, getting on a zoom if that's your thing, or of course in person. The shared time is where we get the most than for the investment that we're making. That knowledge needs to trickle down to organizations, especially during the COVID era. I mean, do you all talk it all in the book about how the nature of work has changed in the past

couple of years with everyone having exhausting zoom calls cash. Yeah. I mean our perspective is it's the pandemics really accelerate a lot of these trends, and so even though they were in play before, now it's just much faster and probably accelerated all these developments by five or ten years in the space of two The fact that we're working more remotely and more hybrid is probably the biggest area we get questions about, and so these are all tools

that can help us a lot with that. It's also been meaningful to people to know that just because it's not in person doesn't mean that it can't help us connect in a meaningful way. So sharing time by zoom, sharing time by phone, I think we have a way of almost dismissing it as it's not going to make us feel connected, and so therefore let's just not bother.

But to be able to say, actually, it can, and here's how to make the most of that time, I think is reassuring and helpful when leaders are trying to build new teams who've never met each other in person, right, which is crazy, and that's very common and prevalent today. The whole relationship is virtually mediated. So knowing how to use those mediums to your advantage and how to get ahead of the divides that they can create, yeah, for sure,

call a lot of ground today. Any other specific challenges posed by today's world of work that we there's the guaring omission from our conversation today. I think that the intimate relationship between these changes in our world of work and the extent to which we are feeling depleted, and there's these spikes and mental health conditions among the workforce.

I think that that connection can be brought out for each of us in a more emotional way to really internalize that sense of change after change after change, after change after change after change, and more change and more change is what's coming. I need to do some acceptance work around that, and then I need to really orient my developmental path to being able to cope with that. It's not about getting through one chapter of challenge, about

preparing for all the chapters to come. And that is this sort of meta perspective that we're trying to help people get to so they can make the best use of the little time that we have to be investing in these skills that will see us through for the long haul versus through any individual chapter. Nice nice, Well, Kavie, thank you for future proofing everyone here today on the Psychology Podcast. Huge congratulations to your very very special book. I mean, this is your moment, so I want to

give it to you and say huge congratulations. I hope you feel a great sense of pride and by knowing that it is helping the world. And thanks for being on my podcast today. Thanks so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it, and thanks for running this podcast, which is always amazing. Well, thank you thanks for listening

to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.