← How to Be a Better Human
How to Be a Better Human
Stressed, stuck, and overthinking? The science of moving forward w/ Ranjay Gulati | 10% Happier
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- [00:00]
Host of How to Be a Better Human
hello how to be a better human listeners today instead of a new episode of our show we have something special for you this is an episode of ten percent happier with dan harris i'm a big fan of dan harris's work i loved his book i love the podcast ten percent happier and in today's episode dan is in conversation with ranjay gulati a harvard professor and author whose pioneering work on courage has changed the way that a lot of people think about their lives in this episode you'll hear nine evidence based tools that can help you act decisively when fear and uncertainty are keeping you in a holding pattern everything from the difference between courage and recklessness to how to accept your fears without being controlled by them tools for remaining calm when the situation is not and the importance of asking for support very practical and also very very important and challenging to do so this episode is a great one i really hope that you enjoy it and we will be back next week with more episodes of how to be a better human but until then enjoy ten percent happier here you go foreign
- [01:03]
Dan Harris
this is the ten percent happier podcast i'm dan harris hello everybody how we doing okay so we've all been there those moments of uncertainty and fear where we freeze we feel paralyzed we overanalyze we overthink and then as a consequence we fail to take action in ways that can later produce a lot of shame and regret i suspect this situation i'm describing right here is increasingly common right now when anxiety and uncertainty are through the roof we're dealing with so many x factors in the world right now ai war political polarization i could go on so in this context in a world that is more uncertain perhaps than ever that leaks into our daily lives in all sorts of conscious and subconscious ways in this context how do you give yourself the resources to get out of paralysis and into action in other words how do you develop and i'm going to use a loaded word here courage you may be tempted to think of courage as an inalterable factory setting but my guest today argues that it's actually a skill which is right on point with the major theme of this show that happiness and all the states of mind we want are in fact skills and my guest is going to lay out a bunch of very practical ways to develop the skill of courage ways that are doable for any of us even if we might think of ourselves as fundamentally fearful even cowardly i'm looking at myself here not for nothing said guest actually has a good semi defensive cowardice or at least an explanation that made me feel a little bit better my guest is runjay galati he's a professor at harvard business school and the author of a book called how to be bold we talk about the difference between being courageous and being reckless how to accept your fears without being controlled by them tools for remaining calm in the face of disaster how to find your moral anchors i'll let him explain what that means the importance of having a support squad how to inculcate courage into your family your workplace and your friend group and much more okay we'll get started with ranjay galati right after
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Ranjay Gulati
this
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- [04:03]
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- [05:20]
Dan Harris
ron j welcome to the
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Ranjay Gulati
show thank you dan pleasure to be here with you today pleasure to have
- [05:25]
Dan Harris
you here well let me start with an obvious question why are you so interested in the subject of courage first
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Ranjay Gulati
you don't know what you're studying and why it's what we call retrospective sense making you look back and say oh now why did i do that what was i thinking how did i end up here and this is one of those projects where if you asked me five years ago ranjay you're going to write a book about courage i'd say you're crazy i mean why would i want to write a book about that but now that i look back in hindsight it makes sense my mother was an entrepreneur my father was a military officer so i have parents who were exemplifying courage in their own very distinct ways one was physical courage in the armed forces in combat my mother as an entrepreneur and then you know some of my own experiences as well that i had i came to realize that courage is a universal currency we all kind of admire it but we don't really know what it is and i have some moments of embarrassment too honestly i think i studied it for myself i never thought i'd write the book even i was really wanting to know more about it out of my own curiosity maybe i can become more courageous
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Dan Harris
not too late when you say you have your own moments of embarrassment what do you mean one of the moments
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Ranjay Gulati
i talk about in the book was when i was fourteen years old my mother had by now built a very successful fashion business working with a couple of fashion houses in paris and she achieved kind of her dream which was to buy a piece of land where she was going to build her own home she hadn't until now had a home it was a beautiful piece of land that she found and then a developer decided he wanted it and started chasing her for the land i was home from boarding school one weekend and the guard from her gate came said there's a gentleman on the door insisting on seeing your mom can you talk to him so i went to the gate he was from the developer big burly fellow and he said i want to see your mother i said no she's not going to see you so don't waste your time he said no tell her last time we will bother her five minutes we'll never bother her again so i went to my mom she says okay five minutes bring him in and she told me she said you stand at that door and make sure he's out of here in five minutes so i bring him into the living room he sits down opposite her on the sofa i'm at the door very immediately he takes out a checkbook with a blank signed check and a piece of paper he says ma' am we're not here to negotiate we'll give you whatever you want mother immediately pushes back says it's not about the money i don't care about money i'm not selling this land it's really not about the money immediately he gets belligerent and says i am going to make you sign this today so i was shocked my mother was shocked she said excuse me please leave now so he then leans back and he pulls back his blazer like i am and he had a gun tucked in his waist now i am at the door i'm fourteen years old pretty big kid by then but i'm like confused i'm thinking should i call the guard should i jump him maybe he's bluffing can i take him on my mother my sister what am i going to do my mother five foot one inches tall without hesitation leaps out of her sofa seat walks across the table and slaps him across the face he didn't even see it coming and she said how dare you come into my house and first you tried to bully me and now you threaten me with a gun get out of here now now it was strategically brilliant in hindsight because it got him off guard her security guard from the gate heard the commotion came running in this guy was so rattled he ran out of there for getting his checkbook behind i was embarrassed because i froze i didn't know what to do and by the time i'm fourteen i was always feeling like you know i'm the boy the man protect my mother you know i had all these kind of illusions about myself but i was always ashamed of the story because i did nothing now i asked my mom afterward i said mom that was crazy weren't you scared did you see a gun she said absolutely i was scared but just because you're scared doesn't mean you do nothing and that kind of stuck in my head i was at one level ashamed of myself but i was also kind of in awe of my mother i hate that story honestly i never told anybody that story till i wrote this book because i was a little ashamed of my own self in
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Dan Harris
this context it's an incredible story and i'm glad you're telling it and i absolutely agree with your mother and this is something you say in your book that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway and yet you could have made a move that got you and your mother killed so there's also some expression about discretion is the better part of valor or whatever you know like there is some wisdom to i don't know about freezing but at least contemplating carefully so that you don't provoke the guy with the gun to kill everybody
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Ranjay Gulati
so you know dan the first essay i could find on courage was written by aristotle who was describing the ideal soldier way back then he made a distinction between courageous and reckless in fact he had cowardice at one extreme reckless at the other extreme and courage was in the middle it was intentional thoughtful action now there's a bit of monday morning quarterbacking here because if the action works out then it was courageous if it didn't work out then you say reckless so i grant you that but in her mind she realized she said if i hadn't gone to him right away what was his next move his next move was to take the gun out and she said the next move was not to point it at her because he needed her signature he was going to point it at me and she said then i knew i had to sign the document so she said i had a very narrow window and let me tell you where it goes back to though the larger point is fear is a natural human response it's biologically hardwired in us it's a primitive emotion that activates the amygdala it's the survival impulse so we need it but it paralyzes us and so much of our life so many things we do whether in one of your episodes you talked about silence being quiet not speaking up even having worry anxiety all these things tie back to fear there's a diffuse manifest fear and we don't have a way to cope with fear winston churchill said fear is a reaction courage is a decision so what i came to realize is that if any of us myself included i'm going to live a more complete life i need to find a way to learn to live with fear engage it not be ashamed of it and this ability to learn to accept fear for what it is but not be overwhelmed by fear was the journey i had to go through and i was trying to understand it better as i wrote this book because you know too many of us live our life through a lens of fear
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Dan Harris
i'll speak only for myself it's a very prominent player in my psychology i do want to come back to this difference between courage and recklessness though and what you said about how the monday morning quarterback there's a way in which your mom's actions could have backfired in ways in which would have led us to describe it as reckless how can we think about being on the right side of that line when we're in
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Ranjay Gulati
an acute situation there's no easy answer to that first of all so let me first start with point of origin of fear and then i'll get to your point actually where does fear come from fear originates in uncertainty what is uncertainty uncertainty is not the same as risk risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes of ten percent chance of this thirty percent chance of this fifty percent chance of this and you're playing the odds uncertainties i don't know i don't know early days of COVID or job dislocation or a diagnosis of a very deadly illness or even something more simpler like college applications where am i going to go what am i going to do or finding a spouse uncertainty is everywhere which means fear is everywhere now how do we deal with this fear in a reasonable way because the default answer to fear is not fight or flight it's freeze or flight sometimes doing nothing is riskier than doing something that might not work out my mother's calculus was doing nothing was not an option but it required her to deal with her fear because she could have just sat back and waited it out to see how this plays out but if you saw this guy's violent outburst you would have known that he wasn't going to stop i am not leaving here till you sign this this thing was going south very fast so i think you're right there is always going to be a fine line here and not every courageous story we know ends up with a happy ending also right but the question is how do we learn to tame fear how do we learn to understand a fear and how do we learn to then take the best course of action we possibly can versus fear clouds judgment fear clouds the amygdala fear clouds the prefrontal cortex and we are just paralyzed i think
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Dan Harris
what you're saying is that it can be very hard in the moment to draw the line between courage and recklessness and often it's only clear in hindsight based on the result but what the most important thing to do here is to learn how to tame our fear so that we can make the best decision possible fully understanding that there may be outcomes we don't like we are taking a risk hopefully a calculated risk when we act out of courage exactly
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Ranjay Gulati
so what i've discovered is these people who are courageous as we characterize them they somehow instinctively have created a system in their own minds about learning to tame fear even sometimes trick fear they have a relationship with fear that somehow allows them not to be paralyzed by it now i tried to find the social science research around it saying like what are these people doing here and i was looking not at like famous characters only right i was looking at brandon say a cashier at a dance hall in california when a mass shooter came in captain sullenberger who landed the plane in the hudson river but not just people like that who are in the moment courageous i also looked at francis haugen who was my former student who spent one year agonizing over whether she should be the whistleblower at facebook and so there is sometimes there are instinctive in moment courage some are more intentional deliberate courage some involve physical courage meaning it's physical danger some are moral courage the word courage gets associated a lot and is confused so i was trying to say my biggest learning was that courage is accessible to all it's a skill it's a muscle we can all acquire given the uncertainty in the world around us and the manifest fear that comes with it i think it's important to think about courage as a currency we all need today we need to resource ourselves to not let fear paralyze us in the world we are trying to navigate and live through right
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Dan Harris
now okay so if the operating thesis of the book is that courage is a trainable skill not an unalterable factory setting the how of that you divide up into nine steps or nine c's nine words that begin with c words like coping and confidence and commitment so let's start working through some of these c's we may not get through all of them but let's do as many as we can in the time we have the first of the nine c's is coping what do you mean by
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Ranjay Gulati
that i should preface that by saying historically human beings when they'd encountered uncertainty and fear they prayed a belief in a higher power the most effective way humankind for thousands of years has found to deal with uncertainty is to pray a belief in a higher source is being there for me is an important way in which people kind of cope now there are other ways in which people also understand this and i found the following among most of these people if you look at how people operate we don't see things as they are we see them as we are now what do i mean by that we all look at the world through a lens of meaning and identity why am i here captain sullenberger who landed the plane in a us airways flight in the hudson river had ninety seconds to do it the katie couric asked him what were you thinking when you had to do that he said i realized in that moment that my forty years of flying my entire life up to that moment had been a preparation to handle that moment this was it this was my moment when i talked to suma jain a physician in new orleans er physician in the early days of COVID a young doctor who has two kids at home young kids at home and is worried she's going to bring covid back home and give it to her family and a decision she has to make is should she stay home or come to work she says this was my olympic moment i trained as a physician to do this i had no option i had to do it so coping is one thing where you cope through belief in a higher power conviction is another thing where you believe in something so those are the two i would start with i discovered that most of these people had a personal belief now i'll go back to my mother my mother was a self made woman in a very male dominated society where she had to fight against all kinds of gender odds to do what she had done and she'd been pushed around by a lot of these people in business and government and so forth and so this guy showing up was just another man showing up trying to bully her saying i'm taking away your land and you can't do anything about it so it touched her at a very personal level it was about her identity who am i so it starts from that kind of place where you have a conviction or a belief i mean frances haugen did not want a whistleblower because it would blow up her career hard charging harvard mba and she was talking to her parents and she said why me mom let somebody else do it there's a lot of people at facebook who should be doing this why should i do it and her parents flipped it around said if not you then who and she was like yeah but that story also reveals another c which is courage rarely happens alone the hollywood portrayal is one of like james bond jason bourne the solitary hero it's usually a collective effort you know so i've talked about the first one i've talked about conviction i'm not talking about connection i found that there were four aspects of connection people looked for resource support they looked for information support they looked for moral support and they looked for feedback support if you look at how frances haugen did it she found all these forms of support from her network of people her family was one a friend of hers who's a priest was another one who gave her feedback a lawyer at a firm that specialized in whistleblowing was another one a wall street journal editor was another one so it was the collective that gave it to her but you know the the modern day version of courage we tell is one of the solitary solo effort i've talked about three now with you i just jumped ahead a little bit here i'll tell you my favorite though can i get to my favorite one sure there's two actually the first one is called comprehension and it comes from research by a university of michigan professor carl w and he was studying firefighters and what he found is that firefighters don't just run into a building that's reckless right they're not running into a building what they do is they observe the building from outside they see how fast the fire is going they try to find out is somebody need to be rescued they see if there's anything combustible there and they form an initial hypothesis then they go into the building as soon as they go into the building they gather more information each step more they go in they are updating their belief it's what we call acting your way into knowing most of us want to know before we act that's why we say let's be deliberate let's be cautious sometimes there's no way to know without taking action so if you're making a big decision sometimes you break it down into smaller decisions and each small step you take you're taking it in order to learn more so sometimes you have to act your way into knowing now i'll add to that another point which is i call confidence i don't like that confidence word it comes from research by a stanford professor named albert bandura bandura was also interested in fear and he recruited stanford undergraduate students who were terrified of snakes technical term is ophidiophobes and he was going to convince them over a period of several weeks with slow exposure showing them videos and all to ultimately hold a snake actually a corn snake they're harmless don't bite but they're six feet long they look scary half the students dropped out as the study progressed the other half who stuck in there eventually held a snake what's most interesting is not that they did it but how this simple study transformed how they thought about themselves it made them realize that if i can overcome one of my worst nightmare fears snakes i can do anything and he called this research self efficacy what in local parlance we would call can do mindset i can do it now you see that with entrepreneurs not all some entrepreneurs no matter how many setbacks come their way and the business is failing they're running out of cash everything is going wrong but i know i'm going to get it done i can do it i got it i'll figure it out what i was trying to do was understand how these people resource themselves in different ways to really take on fear i'll give you one last one and then i'll promise to shut up is calm and this one you've dealt with in some of your episodes because one way to think about calm is meditation the modern day psychology version of this is what is called emotional self regulation so sports psychologists are all over this because what is their number one job to keep their player calm in the face of very stressful situations there's a whole bunch of strategies inside the calm chapter where i talk about how do these people and meditation is a very important part of that story too by the way but there are other tactical things they do as
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Dan Harris
well well maybe say a little bit more about what those are so one
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Ranjay Gulati
of them is rituals i interviewed a ukrainian commando at the front line who used to be a lawyer till four years ago and he said that on the front line he has a whole set of morning safety rituals he does that he believes invoke a higher power that he believes are going to protect him in this moment so rituals serve several purposes one is it invokes a higher power that we believe is going to protect us it also is a very useful distraction technique it normalizes things you stop thinking about the situation so you compartmentalize so if you look at captain sullenberger what do pilots do immediately when this thing happens he starts to make a checklist and pilots do that because checklists you stop thinking about the situation and landing the plane on the hudson no pilot has ever done this before the last time a pilot tried to do it the plane flipped and half of them died i have to do that in the next ninety seconds no he's just going through his checklist here's my checklist step number one step number two step number three step number four so how these people find ways to tame their fear outwit their fear is interesting and i've given you extreme examples but i've come to realize most of us in our lives we're living our fears not our dreams there is this diffuse fear that most of us don't even see it and it really undermines our ability to make choices take actions that might allow us to live to our fullest potential you know daily choices that paralyze us you know some have described courage as the master virtue that unlocks all other virtues that without courage you can't really experience other virtues now having said that i also wrote my first chapter was on cowardice coward is one of the worst words you can use to describe somebody but i think it's important to start this journey by first recognizing that fear is normal you gotta name it to tame it first of all there's a lot of shaming around fear don't be scared i remember doing that to my kids myself right i don't want to go to the basement dad it's scary i'm like what do you mean it's scary get down there and we do it much more to boys than girls there's a gender bias here so we create a very antagonistic denial relationship with fear i think fear has to be our friend you know i got to like okay fear i feel it i feel it i'm okay with being scared but we don't see that in modern day media we look at the heroic characters we read about and see we never hear about them being scared mahat gandhi you know one of the amazing individuals before he started his political career he was a lawyer in london he was terrified of public speaking when he went for his first case in front of a judge he froze he couldn't speak he just couldn't speak the judge threw him out admonished him threw him out told his client go find another lawyer so it made me realize that people find ways to resource themselves to take on things that are the most terrifying things and i think if they can do it there's hope for us maybe we can learn something from them agreed
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Dan Harris
coming up renjay talks about some more strategies for coping in moments of uncertainty and how to create a positive narrative to guide you through chaos
- [30:24]
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Host of How to Be a Better Human
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Dan Harris
let me just go back to the beginning of the nine c's which was coping and when i brought it up with you you talked and this came up later as well this idea of a higher power or faith in the book i believe you talk about the fact that coping that there are two strategies that may seem to be in opposition there's the hyper rational move of what you call risk hunting which i'm hoping to get you to describe and then there's also this faith in a higher power yeah how do these work together how should we think about operationalizing these ideas in
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Ranjay Gulati
our lives great catch i skipped over that so i found there were two ways in which people cope with fear one was a belief in a higher power it's something that is very universal and by the way in times of uncertainty even in modern times they find that people's attendance of religious institutions goes up so our belief in higher power increases when there is more uncertainty in our lives it seems the other approach i find is interesting and i don't know if they're necessarily in opposition to each other the next one people sometimes lose i'm going to get more data i'm going to gather more data and more data and more data and i'm going to try and turn this uncertain situation into a certain situation i need to understand this completely and somehow i am going to nail this down think about somebody getting a really difficult health diagnosis some will pray and say i hope you know i'm going to be okay take care of me god they'll also go to the doctor and try to see what they need to do and they'll understand their options but then you have others who go like the extreme i'm going to research this like a phd and i'm going to find out every single person the specialist i'm going to go talk to ten different physicians i'm going to analyze this like crazy i am not going to take your word for it and i believe in my efforts to gather more information i will also calm down a little bit because i feel more in control i don't think they're in opposition to each other but there are two ways in which humans respond i think both are powerful ways to cope with fear because ultimately we're trying to make sure that fear doesn't paralyze us one of
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Dan Harris
the other strategies you talk about and i'm not sure which c this falls under is storytelling telling yourself a story about the situation and your role within
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Ranjay Gulati
the situation what i wanted to point out was here is that when i get into the seas commitment is where i talk about the stories we tell ourselves and not all of the characters but most of these people have a self narrative we all have a self narrative in our head who am i why am i here what am i meant to be doing some of us are more familiar with that self narrative others are not tuned into it and it turns out this self narrative that is in our head really shapes how we think about ourselves how we look at situations my mother had a self narrative i'm a self made woman and no one is going to push me around i worked really incredibly hard to get to where i am and i am not going to let anybody take it away from me so what is our self narrative what is important to us you know suma jain the physician down in new orleans saying i trained to be a physician to help people and now when people need my help in the most critical of moments i'm going to stay home because i'm too scared so you know she had to really resource herself with that kind of self narrative other times other people give us the narrative you know francis haugon's parents saying if not you then who and so you look at some of these people they have a narrative about themselves like i am this is who i am this is what i believe in they have convictions about some things that they hold dear so how do we create a belief system in which there are some fundamental beliefs that we hold dear and then we can remind ourselves of them when we have situations of uncertainty and people call them values they are values but beneath values is purpose why am i here so i found that these people who have convictions not only do they have a strong set of values but they have great clarity about their purpose why intention what in sanskrit they call dharma dharma is all about understanding the why question most of hinduism and buddhism and all the spiritual threads over there were try if you understand your why then everything else falls into place these people are very
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Dan Harris
connected to the why you raised this question but i want to push you on it how do we get a sense of what our moral anchors are in a way that would give us sustenance and resourcing in times of fear and uncertainty the worst time to try
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Ranjay Gulati
to figure that out is during a crisis right right right so it's not the ideal moment to do that saying oh i'll deal with that when i have to deal with the situation you ain't gonna be able to deal with the situation it's interesting one of my colleagues studies white collar criminals and studies all these people who have a white collar meaning they had high paying high powered jobs who end up in jail and it's interesting one of the common themes is they never clarified their own moral anchor and principle belief in advance they were like they said i'm very pragmatic i figured out my moral principles in the moment as situation demanded and that's the worst recipe not to only land yourself in jail but also you don't have a ready made resource you might need to take bold action what do you believe in why are you here i look at some of the most insightful people i've met they have great self awareness and self clarity and i go back to the why question i think moral principles and values are great but the ultimate unlock is the why question why am i here and if you get to the why question a lot of things fall into place i was meant to do this i had to do this i didn't see any other option for myself and i think we all have to ask ourselves what do you believe in what's important to you i mean can i just give you a sports example of this please it's very interesting i have a side hobby an interest in sports coaches i used to be an athlete and it's very interesting to me to see how coaches work with players to make them perform better as one professional coach told me he said i take a professional athlete who is self driven determined has pushed themselves to the limits to rise to the top and become one of the top athletes in the world and then i get them and my job is to show them how to be even better how do i do that this person has pushed themselves as hard as they could as far as they could this is football so it's a team sport he said you know all this time they push themselves for themselves and you can do a lot for yourself self interest drives you very far he said my job is to connect them to something more than themselves i want to connect them to their teammates to each other i want to connect them to the team as a collective feeling proud of the team i want to connect them to me they're playing for me as a coach and when you start to do something for something bigger than yourself you up your game and the marines do this too by the way semper fidelis in the marine corps you're fighting for each other always faithful some even talk about it as relative fear the fear of letting your teammates down is greater than the fear of dying so i think we have to understand how these kinds of people find interesting ways to deal with this thing we call fear which is a natural human impulse and once they find their way to work through fear i know you know the work on regret and research by some cornell professors like twenty five years ago showed that people have much more regret in life about inaction than action yeah if we can only resource ourselves in dealing with fear a lot of things open up
- [42:28]
Dan Harris
for us there's another c i want to dig in you made a reference earlier to the fact that we can draw a lot of sustenance we can build a sense of resourcing in moments of uncertainty through the sea of connection through other people and you reference that there are four types of support that people fall back on can you double
- [42:50]
Ranjay Gulati
click on that sure i must give you an embarrassing example of this please so for fifteen years one of my favorite leadership case studies that i teach in the classroom is about the south pole explorer ernest shackleton so shackleton in nineteen thirteen goes down to the south pole and he's going to navigate from one end of the pole to the other and somehow he and his twenty eight men they get stuck on ice and the winter comes and the winter is minus seventy degrees somehow they survive the winter but at the end of the winter when summer is coming the melting ice crushes the ship ship and sinks it and now they only have three lifeboats twenty one foot long in the roughest sea on the planet even today to cross the ross sea it's really really hard journey and there's nobody down there and these guys survive for two and a half years and somehow magically he brings them all back alive we have videos here a primitive camera then show the video and the whole case about shackleton did this and shackleton he did this and shackleton did that as i was researching this book i thought oh let me bring shackleton in as one of the case studies so i bring shackleton as one of the case studies as i'm researching it i find that in his own memoirs he explains that he could never have done it alone he had three people in what he called his support squad and these were his inner circle and what kind of support did they give him and then i said let me read what he talks about and i connected it to these four forms of support first one moral support boss you can do it there were so many times when shackleton actually lost his own self confidence i don't know if we can make it because he made a number of wrong calls along the way he started doubting his own judgment and so he got moral support from them the second thing was information support one of them was the captain one was his second first officer they had also been down there and they were giving him information that he was missing that was important resource support they were able to tap into resources in the ship and outside saying okay we're going to go and find food we're going to go and do this we're going to do that and the last one was feedback support they gave him real time feedback saying boss the people need to see you out there we don't want to see you being scared and nervous so it was interesting across all of them how these heroic characters that we like to teach i taught it as this shackleton is a james bond kind of hero actually really leaned on other people for support i went back if you look at mandela you look at gandhi you look at martin luther king you look at any of these modern day heroes as well they all had a support squad so one of the questions we can all ask ourselves is who's your support squad who do you lean on in times of uncertainty who do you count as your inner support squad that i think becomes a really important
- [46:09]
Dan Harris
question to ask ourselves especially in an era of social isolation and atomization and hyper individualism and perfectionism and all of this stuff the culture is not guiding us in the right direction on this one so i just want to emphasize that what you're pointing at is really important coming up ranjay talks about how to inject courage into whatever culture you're operating in workplace et cetera et cetera and some strategies for becoming more bold
- [46:47]
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- [49:11]
Dan Harris
so just to reset here your overarching thesis is that courage is a a skill that we can develop the how of that is these nine c's we've been talking about the first six of the nine c's coping confidence or conviction commitment connection comprehension and calm the last three plan charisma and culture are really about how to engender courage in an organization you touched on this a little bit not only through shackleton but also through your interest in sports coaches but what should those of us who are in leadership positions either in a workplace or in a family or in a friend group know about how to get this as you call master virtue into into the
- [49:58]
Ranjay Gulati
culture so you know as somebody who's been around organizations for a long time i have learned one thing context matters we are all social creatures we respond to the social cues in our context we are individual creatures too but as much as we don't want to believe it especially in america we don't want to believe we are in any way socially influenced we believe we're hyper individualists context matters and i think what i would say is that as we look at context even in a family we have a context we create as a family the parents create a context in which behavior is manifest what's acceptable what's not we role model it we penalize some things and we recognize some things so how do we create a context in which courage is not only recognized but cherished and encouraged and learning to be bold is something that we not only tolerate but we actually support and i tell you what context matters like one of the companies i wrote a case study on the leader when he was going to change the organizations he said somebody gave him advice and said you can't turn sheep into wolves so he said what do you mean he said the advisor said cull the sheep and hire some wolves and he disagreed with it vigorously and he said i'm going to teach sheep to be wolves and he led this most incredible turnaround without laying off a single person the same organization the bottom rated bank in singapore nickname from dbs it was called damn bloody slow it was the worst rated bank to the number one bank in the world in ten years and he said without laying off anybody so he said how do you change the context in which people not to underappreciate how context shapes our behavior so those three chapters are really true for anybody thinking about what is the context you can create create in which people will find the ability to act more courageously that's really what i was trying to get at there now for the individual the question i should ask is we should all opt and self select to be in contexts that encourage courageous behavior if we want to be courageous you know some organizations do not others do let's pick one that everybody knows netflix is something i talk about in the book so right now we look at netflix and say oh my god how do these guys do it they took on blockbuster which had seven thousand stores they knocked out blockbuster out of business then they shut down all their dvd rental warehouses which they had used to knock out blockbuster and moved into streaming then they said oh streaming is costing us too much money because you have to pay disney and everybody else let's make our own content oh then by the way if we're making our own content let's make content in india and turkey and south africa and brazil and everywhere else and you're like who are these guys and then eventually they have to compete with amazon apple disney paramount and they're still winning the streaming war and you're like who are these guys reed hastings was asked who was the founder ceo what do you do as ceo and you know what he said i do nothing i do nothing because he said i've created a context in which they encourage experimentation trying new things failing learning he wants them all to take bold action so that's the thing i think you have to you know so how do we create a context in which people they call it context not control they call it freedom with responsibility right so those are the kinds of things these people are able to do is to create this kind of courageous action so context is hugely important i think for all of us there's a chapter i didn't write dude and i can tell you about that the last chapter that never got written sure then the dalai lama wrote the foreword so i didn't write that chapter i said like you know after the dalai lama what am i going to say is ultimate courage is to really look inwards even in the bhagavad gita and elsewhere they talk about that the scariest thing for human beings is to look inside and so managing yourself is i think the hardest thing to do we have all kinds of barriers and resistances so i would say i came to realize that ultimate courage or overcoming this fear is about dealing with our own inner journey as a human being what are my goals what are my values what's my purpose what's my legacy how do i think about myself those are scary for most of us they're scary questions and that's why we tend to shy away from them say i'm busy i don't have time for this you know it's like i don't want to deal with this so i think the inner journey everything i've talked about as courage is an outer journey but i've come to realize that the ultimate hardest of all is the inner journey because courage can be used in that direction
- [55:40]
Dan Harris
as well well i would agree with that in my own experience you end the book on a sentiment that i also agree with and it really is an echo of where we began this conversation that i believe your words are that courage is a journey that we don't arrive at some perfect state of courage this is a skill that develops over time the words you use i believe our boldness begets boldness that we can really nudge ourselves in this direction step by step over time am i summarizing that correctly and if so what
- [56:15]
Ranjay Gulati
would you add no i think that's right i think is people don't become bold overnight necessarily sometimes they do situations demand it think about the snake study i told you about where it took weeks and weeks for these kids to slowly overcome and understand their fear of snakes and slowly then try to turn that into an acceptable situation so courage shows its face in all corners of life i interviewed a dear friend of mine who just unfortunately passed away of cancer and i interviewed her to just this is about a year and a half ago and she was a healthy young athletic woman who had a cough that wouldn't go away and then she eventually went to see her physician who said let's do an x ray and they found a tumor in her lungs and this thing then snowballed into a whole set of things and she was amazing you know we don't use the word courage for people like that i would describe as an epitome of courage because she was dealing with so much uncertainty because there was no clear treatment plan you can do this you can do that surgery radiation chemo this maybe on the one hand on the other i don't know it's too big let's try to shrink it let's try this first let's try that first and how she had to navigate this uncertainty in her life until the very end in buddhism they say you know the biggest fear is fear of death so you're confronting your mortality and how do you do it with grace without reading my book i think she relied on connections for support she did comprehension by trying to get more information slowly to understand it she relied on coping a belief in some higher power of a higher force right so i think part of the issue i think is the word courage is out there as a lofty word it's for the heroic characters out there who do incredible things to save the world and i think part of the hope i have is we make courage part of our daily vocabulary i am courageous fear it's okay bring it on i'm scared yes i am scared it's a scary situation but you know what i'm gonna figure out some way i'm not gonna let it paralyze me i'm gonna find some way forward might be reckless might not be the right answer but being paralyzed is not the
- [59:07]
Dan Harris
answer either well said ron jelotti the book is called how to be bold the support of surprising science of everyday courage thank you very much for coming on really appreciate it great to meet
- [59:19]
Ranjay Gulati
you thank you dad you were a master this there thank you very much
- [59:28]
Dan Harris
thanks again to ranjay it was awesome to meet him also don't forget to check out my new ish meditation app danharris dot com is the place to sign up join the party there's a free fourteen day trial if you want to try before you buy finally thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show our producers are tara anderson and eleanor vasily our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at pod people lauren smith is our managing producer marissa schneiderman is our senior producer dj cashmere is our executive producer and nick thorburn of the band islands wrote our theme
- [60:18]
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Ranjay Gulati
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Dan Harris
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