Curious Minds at Work

Humans have always lived with anxiety. Thousands of years ago, we feared attacks by wild animals. Today we worry whether we’ll have enough money to retire.

It’s not the anxiety that matters, but how we handle it. Our responses can often compound the problem.

For example, feeling anxious about a demanding customer, we reward ourselves with a pint of ice cream. As the pressure mounts, it becomes a daily habit, and then, an addiction. At that point, our response to anxiety is no longer giving us the reward we expected. Instead, it makes us feel worse.

Judson Brewer offers an alternate path. A medical doctor and researcher, he studies anxiety and addiction. He’s spent his career helping people unwind the habits that amplify their anxiety and lead to unhealthy, addictive behaviors. Judson shares these methods in his latest book, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind.

He argues that we can’t think our way out of anxiety. Instead, through a combination of mindfulness, practice, and understanding our habit loops, we can change our behaviors for life. It’s a thoughtful, compelling approach that will give you a different perspective on anxiety.

Episode Links

Eric Kandel

Reinforcement Learning

Thomas Borkovec

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Dopamine reward prediction error

Dana Small

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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Imagine that fewer people are buying your organization’s product or service. It’s a shift you didn’t anticipate. To fix it, you study the data, identify the problem, and then take steps to address it.

Your plan may include changes in marketing or team incentives. What it won’t include is doing nothing or trying to turn things around with one grand gesture.

Yet that’s how we often approach meeting diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

Joan Williams is author of the book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good. She’s a Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, where she directs the Center for WorkLife. For decades, she’s studied structural inequality in the workplace.

What she’s learned is that the most successful organizations treat diversity as a business goal.

I wanted to interview Joan because she offers a fresh perspective on the topic. Through her work, she’s identified the most common ways bias shows up in organizations. She’s also figured out how to make bias training more effective. Finally, she’s learned which question to ask to determine an organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

After listening to this interview, I guarantee you’ll walk away with lots of new insights.

Episode Links

Bias Interrupters

Why Companies Should Add Class to Their Diversity Discussions

A Winning Parental Leave Policy Can Be Surprisingly Simple

How One Company Worked to Root Out Bias from Performance Reviews

Data-Driven Diversity

Implicit Association Test

Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty: The Gendered Effects of Social Class Signals in an Elite Labor Market

The Maternal Wall

Matrix by Lauren Groff

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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Why do we grieve, and what happens when we do? For much of human history, answers to these questions have come primarily from writers and thinkers. While they’ve given us powerful language to describe how we feel, they’ve shed little light on the science behind our feelings.

Neuroscientists are changing that. Armed with innovative approaches for studying grief, coupled with modern technologies that capture it, researchers are learning what happens in our brains when we grieve. Their findings reveal not only why we grieve, but the important role learning plays throughout the grieving process.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, Director of the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress Lab, and professor at the University of Arizona, has been at the forefront of this research. In her book, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, we learn how she and her colleagues are creating a new paradigm for understanding grief and the grieving process.

A remarkable writer and storyteller, Mary-Frances has written a compelling book. In it, she corrects many of our misconceptions, while expanding what we know about an experience we all, ultimately, will have.

Episode Links

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 

M. Katherine Shear and The Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief

George A. Bonnano and the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab

It's Time to Let the Five Stages of Grief Die

The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement

Changing Lives of Older Couples

Noam Schneck

Donald Robinaugh

The Power of Fun by Catherine Price

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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From time to time, I’ll run across creative ways people are using apps I like. It often prompts me to learn more. I’ll watch some videos, read a few articles and, inevitably, what I discover is that I’ve been accessing just a fraction of what the software can do. 

I got that same feeling while reading award-winning science writer, David Robson’s latest book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. It made me realize that I’m leveraging far fewer of my brain’s features than I could be.

That means I’m missing out on a lot. For example, quicker recovery from illness and injury. Better performance from more effective stress management. And adding years to my life with more thoughtful approaches to fitness and aging.

What scientists are learning about the connections between the human brain and performance is incredible. And David Robson manages to take this research and organize it into a compelling playbook for a better life.

Episode Links

Can You Think Yourself Young?

How Thinking about ‘Future You’ Can Help You Build a Happier Life

The Brain is a Prediction Machine: It Knows How Well We Are Doing Something before We Even Try

Believing is Seeing: Using Mindlessness (Mindfully) to Improve Visual Acuity

Ellen Langer

A Placebo Can Work Even When You Know It’s a Placebo

Nocebo Effect

Improving Acute Stress Responses: The Power of Reappraisal

Jeremy P. Jamieson

Veronika Job

Can You Ever Get Over a Lingering Grudge?

Dr. Michael Greger and nutritionfacts.org

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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Confidence seems elusive. We do something that comes easily and we don’t think twice about it. Or we try something new that’s challenging and we can't stop thinking about our mistakes. It can leave us thinking that confidence is something other people just seem to have. All the time.

Performance psychologist Nate Zinsser knows that’s just not true.

For decades he’s been working with Olympians, professional athletes, military leaders, and other high performers in his role as Director of West Point's Performance Psychology Program. What he’s learned is that confidence is something we need to build, protect, and practice. In his book, The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance, he shares the methods he’s developed to help us do just that.

Reading Nate’s book made me realize how many misconceptions we have about confidence, and they’re the kind of misconceptions that can really hold us back. I think you’ll enjoy the interview and I know you’ll learn a lot from the book.

Episode Links

How I Avoid Burnout: A West Point Performance Psychologist

A Psychologist Who Helps West Point Cadets Develop Mental Strength Shares 3 of His Best Tips

Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps: Where to Look for Inventions and Discoveries During Skilled Performance

Gender Gap in Orthopedics Remains Relatively Unchanged

After-action Review

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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For women who want a career and a family, we might expect things would be easier today. After all, women have greater access to education and job opportunities. We’ve seen advances in reproductive health. And we’ve made inroads in anti-discrimination laws and policies. Yet gaps in pay and promotions remain a problem.

Today’s guest, Claudia Goldin, is a Harvard University economist who’s spent her career studying women in the workplace. She believes there’s an important factor we’ve overlooked, namely, greedy work. These are jobs with lots of financial upside and promotion potential for employees who can log long hours and take on big assignments at a moment’s notice. And it’s the work that women with children often take less advantage of compared to their partners. As a result, ambitious career women can find themselves stalled out and earning less.

In her book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, Claudia traces how women got here. Drawing on extensive data sets, she reveals five patterns in women’s career and family behaviors: for women graduating from 1900-1910s, it was either career or family; for 1920-1930s graduates, jobs then families; with 1950s graduates, families then jobs; women graduating in the 1970s had careers then families; and, for women graduating in the 1980s-1990s it’s been careers and family.

Yet, for today’s ambitious career women juggling career and family, it can mean increasing dissatisfaction with both. And in analyzing the way many careers today are structured, Claudia helps us understand why. It’s an insightful way to understand a problem we’ve been living with for a long time.

Episode Links

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Other Side of the Mountain: Women's Employment and Earnings over the Family Cycle

Assessing Five Statements about the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women

Marriage Bar

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Support the Podcast

If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show.

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Most of us have a love-hate relationship with New Year’s resolutions. We love that feeling of a fresh start. But we hate how our commitments seldom make it to Valentine’s Day.

So what if this year we had an expert teach us how to do it right? 

Ayelet Fishbach is that expert. She’s a social psychologist at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.

In this interview, we talk about how to choose goals that energize us and how to pair them with incentives that keep us motivated. We also discuss a system for simultaneously working on multiple goals. Finally, we learn about the power of social support and how we can get it.

Episode Links

Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-term Goals

The Structure of Intrinsic Motivation

You Think Failure is Hard? So Is Learning From It

Slacking in the Middle

Pursuing Goals with Others

Marie Curie and Pierre Curie

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Support the Podcast

If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show.

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We hear it all the time, that the pace of technological change today is faster than ever before. But what does that really mean, and why does it matter?

It means that if you were born in 1920, technologies in your life changed slowly. Think electricity, cars, telephones. At the time, these were huge innovations. But they took over 40 years to reach 3 out of 4 households in the U.S.

Compare this to the experience of someone born just 50 years later. Digital technologies like social media took only 11 years to reach 7 of 10 Americans, and smartphones took even less time. This shift to software platforms has meant that today’s tech scales further and faster than 1920s technologies ever could.

Yet the policies, laws, and systems we need to protect and guide us haven’t kept up. Our political, economic, and legal institutions were designed for a another time, one with different expectations for labor and privacy. It’s resulted in a growing gap between old-tech regulations and the ones we need to thrive in today’s digital world.

Azeem Azhar is someone who’s thought a lot about this. And his book, The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society provides a useful model for thinking about where we’ve come from, where we’re headed, and how to navigate these changes.

Episode Links

Ray Kurzweil

Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View podcast

CubeSat

The Manhattan Project 

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

1981 Air Traffic Controllers' Strike

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

Horace Dediu

The Story of Work by Jan Lucassen

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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Just a few years ago, the possibility of working from anywhere made us wistful. With family and friends, we’d play the “what if” game: What if we could work from home? What if we could live somewhere warmer? What if we could move to another country?

When the pandemic hit and remote work made “what if” possible, some responded, “why not?” And that’s when things got complicated.

Now we’re faced with a different set of questions; Why should we ever return to the office? When we’re not in the office, how do we make friends? How do we create an equitable work experience for remote employees?

These are the kinds of questions Anne Helen Petersen and I talk about in this interview. Anne came on the show once before to discuss her book, Can’t Even, about burnout and the millennial generation. I invited her back on to discuss her latest book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.

Anne and her co-author, Charlie Warzel argue that, when it comes to what work can look like, we’re living in a time where the answers we arrive at have never been more important. We have an opportunity to make work better.

Episode Links

Culture Study on Substack by Anne Helen Petersen

Galaxy Brain on Substack by Charlie Warzel

The Remote Work Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet

How to Care Less about Work

The Surprising Science of Meetings by Steven Rogelberg

Beginner's Mind by Yo-Yo Ma

Beyond Collaboration Overload by Rob Cross

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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There are countless benefits to collaboration. We get new ideas. Solve problems more quickly. Produce higher quality work.

But too much of anything can turn toxic. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

Rob Cross, Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, has spent time with hundreds of leaders who’ve figured out how to collaborate more effectively. What he learned led to him develop a framework to help others do the same. It’s a combination of guardrails and behaviors, all of which lead to more strategic and satisfying collaborations. And Rob shares these insights in his book, Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being.

Episode Links

When Collaboration Fails and How to Fix It

Collaboration Overload is Sinking Productivity

The Secret to Building Resilience

Invisible Network Drivers of Women's Success

Impact and Effort Matrix

Do You Have a Life Outside of Work?

The People Who Make Organizations Go - Or Stop

Don't Let Micro-Stresses Burn You Out

Multipliers and Impact Players by Liz Wiseman

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Support the Podcast

If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show.

Subscribe

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