Most advice on power is about why we need it or how we can get it. And it's typically focused on things outside us, like titles or promotions.

While these external markers are important, they can leave us empty inside. 

Advice that focuses solely on external power leaves out how to build and maintain the crucial internal power we need.  That’s why Chris Lipp decided to mine the research on personal power and, ultimately, to write a book on it. In this interview we talk about his latest book, The Science of Personal Power: How to Build Confidence, Create Success, and Obtain Freedom. 

Chris’s book gives us an opportunity to build the inner foundation for success, so we can match it with external achievements. If you're looking for a book with concrete ways to center and inspire you in your work - and in your life - you'll find it here.

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Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He believes leaders are made, not born, and he’s spent decades proving it.

In this interview, we talk about his findings and how they apply to today’s leaders. We also discuss his latest book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In it, he shares three characteristics people repeatedly bring up when describing truly great leaders: they act as visionaries, exemplars, and mentors.

Adam’s written an insightful guide for current and aspiring leaders looking to take their craft to the next level.

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Interview with leadership expert Frances Frei

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Conversations play a big role in our personal and professional lives. It’d be hard to build or maintain a relationship without them.  

That’s why Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School Professor and conversation expert, has written the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She’s found that if we improve our conversations, even a little, the results can be game changing.

In this interview, we talk about the framework she’s developed to help us do that. We also discuss how to improve our one-on-one and group conversations. Finally, we learn effective ways to manage difficult conversations, including apologies.

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With few exceptions, we have digital footprints. And each time we scroll social media, run a Google search, or use a smartphone to navigate, we’re adding data to that footprint. While we gain a lot from our ability to do all these things, we also feed companies the data they need to target us.

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist and professor at Columbia Business School. Over the course of her career, she’s consulted with companies eager to profit from our data. In recent years, she’s intentionally shifted her consulting work in support of organizations that want to protect consumer data.

In this interview, I talk to Matz about her book, Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior. We discuss the methods companies use to profile us and how that profiling puts all the power in their hands. We also discuss promising ideas for pushing back, including solutions to empower and unite us.

Matz has written an accessible, highly readable book that anyone with a smartphone needs to read. 

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Now Isn’t the Time to Give Users Control of Their Data

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Interview with Eric Johnson on the Science of Decision-Making

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We go to the dentist, get our eyes checked, and get our cars inspected. These regularly scheduled health and safety audits let us know how we’re doing.

But we rarely audit how we spend our time.

Sure, most of us have a calendar. Yet few of us study how these calendar events impact our happiness. We rarely track the connection between what we spend our time doing and how well we’re flourishing.

As a result, we can find ourselves feeling unhappy, frustrated, and what scientists call “time poor.”

Researchers like Cassie Holmes want to change that. They’ve learned there’s a strong connection between how we spend our time and how happy we feel. In her book, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most, she shares ways we can optimize our calendars for happiness, including ways to avoid distraction, extend joy, create a meaningful schedule, and avoid regret.

Holmes’ tips on time tracking and time auditing are simple and powerful. As the year draws to a close, this may be just the book you’re looking for as we head into a new year.

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Trust by Hernan Diaz

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If you’re a woman in the workplace, you know the deck is rarely stacked in your favor. For example, promotions are harder to come by. The gender wage gap is real. And power can feel elusive.

Psychology professor and researcher, Alison Fragale, has studied the power problem for decades. What she’s figured out is that the solution lies with status. But, as she argues in her book, Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, if women shift their focus to cultivating status, they get further ahead in solving the power problem.

Alison Fragale has unlocked the key to achieving greater status in the workplace. And she shares practical tips on how to get started. It’s a book I’ll be recommending to all my friends

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Why Status and Now Just Power Determines Workplace Success

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There are many good reasons to look to others. For example, you might need expert advice or feedback to improve your performance. But there’s one reason not to, and, that is, to determine your self-worth.

When you look to someone else to define you or tell you how to live your life, you lose a lot. And if you find it hard to believe you’d ever let someone else influence you in those ways, you’d be surprised.

Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist who’s worked with elite athletes, artists, and leaders. Through his work, he’s learned that one of the biggest obstacles standing in their way is fear of other people’s opinions. And he’s seen just how crippling those fears can be. That’s why he’s written the book, The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You.

In talking to Michael, I learned how our biology sets us up to place a lot of weight on other people’s opinions. I also learned how social media is designed to reinforce that fear. Fortunately, Michael shared insights on what to do. I walked away feeling empowered.

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It’s tempting to believe that the self is a constant. That it’s a core component of who we are from the time we’re born.

But social psychologist and Stanford Professor Brian Lowery has a different view. He believes the self we are today is a product of our social relationships – our friends, our families, our communities, our technologies, even our geography. That as our circumstances change, so does the self we believe ourselves to be. In this interview, we talk about this and more from his book, Selfless: The Social Creation of You.

Brian’s argument explains so much about how we operate in the world, and he gives us another reason to prioritize social relationships in our lives.

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A Provocative Theory of Identity Finds There is No ‘You’ in Self

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Interview with Gregory Burns

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We need pleasure in our lives. We also need meaning. Pleasure gives us joy and delight. Meaning gives us purpose and a set of goals to work toward.

But have there ever been times in your life when you’ve experienced meaning and pleasure, yet felt something was missing? Turns out, you’re not alone.

What’s missing, according to recent research, is something called psychological richness. Think of it as mental stimulation. A combination of curiosity and wonder. Lorraine Besser writes about this in her book, The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. She also shares what she and her research colleagues have learned about how to get it.

This is a book that takes something we know we need – mental challenge and stimulation – and calls it out as a key component for living a good life.

Episode Links

What If You Pursued What's Interesting Instead of Happiness?

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Interview with Rainesford Stauffer

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When we’re looking for insights on how to make friends, manage our anxiety, or just live a happier life, we rarely look to the past. Instead, we tend to focus on what today’s thinkers have to say.

But what if the recipe for happiness lies in the past, specifically the 2000-year-old past? What if the ancient writings of Greek philosopher Epicurus hold the answers?

That’s what modern-day philosopher, Emily Austin, argues in her book, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. She teaches us what Epicurus really thought about pleasure and why he made it a cornerstone of his life. She also points out the advantages of an Epicurean mindset over a Stoic one.

Emily’s book is proof that we still have much to learn, for our work and our life, from the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Epicurus!

Episode Links

The Good Life is the One Where Anxiety Falls by the Wayside

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Interview with Tali Sharot

The Team

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