B (2:16)

So I thought in our conversation today we could spend just a bit of time talking about self awareness, because I think so so much of what you say on it is important for people to understand in order for them to take action that'll be useful. And maybe we can just talk about squiggly careers, some of the change and challenge uncertainty that happens, and why becoming shatterproof rather than resilient is an important approach so people can succeed in their squiggly careers.

C (2:42)

Sounds great. Let's do it.

B (2:43)

Okay, so let's start with self awareness. One of the things that I really, really remember and reference from your work is this need to understand that there is a difference between internal and external self awareness. And I wondered if you could just talk about what the distinct distinctions are and why they matter when we're becoming more self aware.

C (3:05)

So I have been a total science nerd empirically researching self awareness for almost 10 years now. And when my team first set out to, you know, kind of start this program of, you know, what is self awareness? Where does it come from? Why do we need it? How do we get more of it? We thought, you know, well, the first thing we should obviously do is define self awareness. And what we discovered as we dug into the research, we read, you know, almost a thousand empirical journal articles, and we discovered that there really wasn't a clear consensus on what this thing was. So naively, we were like, oh, I'm sure we'll figure this out in a couple of months. It took us almost a year to scientifically define what is this thing we call self awareness. So what I'm going to give your watchers and your listeners is kind of simplicity on the other side of complexity. It seems very simple, but there's a lot behind it. So self awareness is the will and skill to understand who we are and how other people see us. And if you listen to that definition, there's these two, I call them camera angles, right? Internal self awareness is understanding what makes us tick, right? What are our values, what are our passions, what are the ideal environments that we want to be in? What are our patterns of behavior over time? And that is critically important. And I think that's sort of how people see self awareness most of the time, is they have a really kind of almost exclusively internal focus. But what we discovered was just as important is that second part of the definition, which is understanding how other people see us. And that's what I call external self awareness. It's basically being able to read the room. It's being able to Understand how do people see you? It's having really strategic and sustainable practices to get feedback. It's paying attention to the impact you're having on other people. But what we discovered was that those two types of self awareness were completely independent. And you know, as a psychologist, that's very exciting because you can put it on like a two by two matrix, right? So you think about it, you could be low on both, high on both, high on one, low on the other. And I find that really practical actually from like an action standpoint because you know, even just sitting there and thinking on your commute to work, which of these two types of self awareness do I have maybe more development to do than I thought about and maybe which of these am I in better shape with? And I think what that does is it kind of gives us a roadmap because we know we have to have both. Like to be self aware, you've got to know both camera angles. But when we think about it, it's probably practical to focus on the one that you have the most growth and development to do.

B (5:49)

It's really interesting as well on the external point. So we do a lot of work with organizations on how to have fast and fearless feedback because a lot of the context is feedback becomes too formal and it often doesn't flow in an organization. And it makes me think if feedback isn't flowing in an organization, then how easy is it for people to have external self awareness?

C (6:11)

It's very hard and the opposite of it, which I love what I love the way you conceptualize that. I totally agree. The opposite of no free flowing external feedback is what I call call awareness for everyone. And there are these really interesting organizational applications to self awareness, right? You think about if feedback is free flowing and it's informal and it's fearless, people are going to surface issues before they become unsolvable problems. People are going to help each other be more successful in the spirit of love and compassion and support. And in an organization like that where information is just flowing everywhere, you're going to be more successful. And I tell a story in my book about this insight about Alan Mullally and how he turned around Ford, right? And he created awareness for everyone where the only thing we can't manage is a secret, right? So creating that organizational culture. I love the work that you guys are doing, it's so important.

B (7:08)

I'm going to put the matrix in our POD sheet which is a summary that goes with the episode so that people can maybe just think about where am I in terms of My internal, external awareness. But one thing as you were talking there about, you know, you thought this was going to be an easy question to answer, and then a year later you kind of got to a conclusion. I feel that that is also reflective of how you might have approached resilience, in that you started to look at resilience and then realised that maybe the research wasn't quite reflective of the reality of resilience.

C (7:38)

So this, as you know, is quite a story. I'm going to try to distill it. So Shatterproof is my third book. My previous two books felt very personal to me in the sense that I told stories about my. I put myself in the narrative when I hoped it would be helpful for the reader. But when I started working on the research for Shatterproof as a scientist, I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me as a human being along the way. So I'll kind of talk about these two parallel paths, but I think it's easy to see how they informed each other and I think how, for the first time ever, I had to be my own subject because I was in desperate need of answers. The background is, and this is kind of funny and weirdly prophetic. In February of 2020, I had just trained a fresh research team of, I think 10 or 11 people. And the subject of our research program we were kicking off was called When Bad Things Happen. Okay, so let's just think about what we were all doing in February 2020. What I kept noticing as I was lucky enough to travel all around the world and coach CEOs and talk about on self awareness was that people were kind of getting to this point, like increasingly over time of, yeah, yeah, I know self awareness is important, but how do I actually live in this world? Right? And what they mean by that is this world of escalating stress and chaos and unpredictability, where seemingly, you know, just when we think we've had the hardest thing happen to us, there's something else right behind it. And so that was really what led to the research program. And what I thought we were examining was how to be resilient. Right. So resilience is, you know, we can sort of loosely define it as the capacity to cope with hard things. But very quickly in our research program, we did a bunch of things. We. I analyzed, I think, 1300 scientific articles, not just on resilience, but on kind of the whole totality of the book. We interviewed early on, 300 working adults to see what happens to you and what's your response when bad Things happen. And what we discovered actually was sort of two things. Number one, there were three responses people could have, right? They could either get broken by the bad thing, they could bounce back resiliently, or they could grow forward and get better and stronger. And that third group was very different from the group that was bouncing back. But I still thought, well, of course that third group is going to be the most resilient, right? Maybe the second group is a little more resilient than the first, but then that third group is really resilient. What we discovered was that there was no relationship between that third group's resilience and whether or not they were getting better and stronger after crisis. And so for me, as a fourth generation entrepreneur with resilience and perseverance in my blood, I was floored. And so that was what led me into the depths of the resilience research. And what I discovered was that it's more that we misunderstand what the research is actually telling us about resilience. It's like a game of telephone, right? You play with your friends when you were younger and you would each tell someone, and by the time you get to the fifth person, it's a totally different message. All of the answers were already there. I analyzed about 500 articles on resilience and 200 of the most highly cited. And so as I was doing that and as my whole concept of resilience was falling apart, and I was saying, my gosh, like, if it's not resilience, what do we do? I was experiencing the limits of resilience myself. I've had a lifetime of really kind of mysterious health problems, and they're all invisible. I look perfectly healthy. That is kind of characteristic of people that have the disease. I ended up learning I had, but I basically reached a point and it was literally one moment I was fine and one moment I wasn't where I hit my resilient ceiling, right? So I was doing all the things you're supposed to do. I was being optimistic. I had my gratitude journal. I was doing yoga. I was, you know, calling my friends and talking to the most important people in my life. I was exercising, I was sleeping, right? I was doing all these things. And yet I had reached a ceiling in my ability to cope. And once I figured that out, once I personally went through that, that's when everything started to click. We ask resilience to do things for us that it wasn't designed to do.

B (12:26)

I think that when I was reading that in the book, as well as your personal Story, which is incredibly, incredibly moving to read. I think two things early on in the book really stuck out for me. The first was that there is a limit for everyone in terms of their level of resilience. And so this idea that we can do all those activities that you mentioned, the gratitude journaling and the calling the friends, and if you just keep doing, that'll be fine. The reality is we all have a limit and we can't rely on resilience to just keep going beyond that limit. I actually found that quite comforting. And that links to my second point that really stuck, which is the phrase you use, grit, gaslighting. And I took that to mean when people kind of say, oh, just keep going, just keep doing a bit more, it'll be fine. You've done this before, you've coped, you're a coper. Which is probably meant with good intent because people maybe don't have your shatterproof strategy yet to offer as an alternative. So it's meant, you know, that people want you to be well and to do well, but in the end it just makes you feel maybe that you're not coping, that you just need to do more of these tools that aren't working for you.

C (13:32)

You're exactly right. So I wrote this book for stressed out strivers, people like you and me and your, and your listeners who are, you know, trying to do great things in the world, but we feel beaten down by just the chronic compounding chaos that's coming at us from all areas of our life. And what I discovered as I was researching this, and this was kind of the more qualitative side of our research, was especially for high achieving people with big goals and big dreams, the experience of hitting our resilience ceiling is on a good day, disorienting and on a bad day, absolutely shameful. Right. So for me, what I experienced was I was gaslighting myself. I was questioning my ability to cope. Things we say are, well, gosh, other people sure have it a lot harder than I do. Why can't I deal with this? Or we say, you know, this isn't even the hardest thing I've had to go through and for some reason I just can't cope. Like, what is wrong with me? And what happens with great gaslighting is it fosters these feelings of guilt and shame, but it shifts our focus away from the real source of our problems. Right? So instead of sort of taking a step back and saying, what is this pain trying to tell me? Which is, as we'll learn, the first step of the shatterproof framework, we're beating ourselves up. It's shocking to me that there wasn't a term for that. Right? So part of what I tried to do with this book is through my own experience, come up with language around this stuff of like, hey, guess what? You might be the most resilient person in the world, but you have a resilience ceiling. And when you hit it, like, this is what's going to happen and there is nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with us for hitting our resilience ceiling. What we know from the research is it's an exhaustible resource, period, full stop. Doesn't say anything about us not being strong enough or tough enough or gritty enough. Like you said, it's because we're human.

B (15:37)

So we get to this point where we say we are at work, all experiencing some of those things that you said, that the change, the challenge, sometimes the chaotic, you know, compounding of all of this stuff. If we don't do anything different, we are all going to hit some kind of ceiling at some point. So we need an alternative strategy for how we respond to it. Which I guess is where the framework for Shatterproof comes into things. And again, I love tools and models and actions and I know that our listeners do as well. Could you talk us through the framework and maybe pick out a couple of tools and actions that are useful for people who may be are going, do you know what? I'm a stressed out striver. What I've been doing is no longer working for me and I'm open to a different approach.

C (16:20)

The way I think about becoming Shatterproof is it's a second skill set that complements resilience. Because resilience has a time and a place, right? It can help us get through very unexpected sort of short term crises. But as we know, that's not what the world looks like. So to find a way to find flourish in a world of constant chaos, we have to go beyond surviving, we have to go beyond adapting. And what we have to do is learn how to harness adversity as an opportunity to transform ourselves. And that's what becoming Shatterproof is. Remember that third group of participants is people who are strengthened by adversity. They don't try to conceal their cracks with this like powering through mindset, right? Or by denying their broken part parts. So becoming Shatterproof very clearly and succinctly means channeling adversity to grow forward, harnessing the broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And that's really important, right? We're not denying that we're breaking. We're saying, gosh, pain is a signal to pay attention. What does that mean? And that's really kind of the first step that takes us into this. So I talk about the Shatterproof roadmap. So anytime that you're feeling like you're reaching your resilience ceiling, or you're just saying, oh, my gosh, like, if one more thing happens to me, I'm going to lose it, that's when you engage this. So the first step of the Shatterproof Roadmap is, I call it, to probe your pain. There's this thing that happens with resilient people like us, which is, you know, got to push through the pain. No pain, no gain, right? I can't break. And there's also this sort of feeling around us of, like, unintentional but very hurtful toxic positivity. People are following social scripts. They're not doing it to be mean. They're just doing it because we're told to say, like, buck up. You can handle this. Right? But what Shatterproof people understand is that pain isn't a personal failure. It's actually a power source. It's a signal to pay attention. You know, you think about physically, pain is a signal that something is wrong, right? And the same is true emotionally. There's a couple of things that you can sort of do in terms of probing your pain. I have, you know, assessments in the book, but there's kind of one piece that I really personally find is helpful. And I actually developed this out of desperation for myself. So I call it befriending your pain. I don't mean relishing in it, loving it. Like going into this place where I love the darkness. Not at all. I suggest you kind of chat it up like you would a friend of a friend at a dinner party, right? Somebody that you don't know that well seems nice enough. And you ask yourself. So, like, you'd ask them so, you know, how long are you visiting? How long are you in town? What are you doing during your visit? Have you been here before? We can change those questions to how long have these emotions been visiting me? Right? How long have they been around? What's the impact of them? What are they doing to me during that visit? And then the last question, I think can be the most powerful, which is, is this their first visit? And one of the things that I've discovered, as I've taught people this framework and I've used it myself, is a lot of the things that are the most painful are repetitive patterns in our life.

B (19:46)

I think just training yourself that, that understanding the pain, whether it's, you know, it could be a physical pain or it could be an emotional pain, a feeling of frustration or tenseness. I suppose there's lots of different ways that we might feel that pain. But taking a mom to pause and understand it a little bit more is why that is such an important part of the first bit of the framework.

C (20:07)

It is. It's what everything else rests on. There's a Lord Byron quote that I give in the book that says adversity is the first path to truth. And the path to truth, in my opinion, and you know, based on all this research, is that it has to start with that, with really, truly befriending or probing what our pain is trying to tell us. Us. So if we go on to the second step of the shatterproof framework, the second step is to trace your triggers. And what that means is, okay, so you've probed your pain, you kind of have a better understanding of what's going on. Now it's time to turn outward and say, what is going on in my environment that is causing me to have these responses? Right. And that sounds like such a simple question. Why wouldn't we ask ourselves that? Almost no one does that in my experience. Right. So there's a bunch of triggers that can set us off. It could be unfairness. It could be being shut out at work from a group happy hour. Right. It could be getting criticized by our boss. And there's a theory in psychology that I think it's actually been my favorite theory in psychology since the early 2000s when I was in grad school, called self determination theory. And what it talks about is, are the things in our environment that bring out either the the best in us or the beast in us. And those are not my words. That's from the founders of the theory, Edward Deasy and Richard Ryan. But the idea behind self determination theory, it's a big theory, but there's one really important piece that talks about the things in our environment can either fulfill or they can frustrate our three fundamental psychological needs. This is 50 years of evidence that they've shown that we have three hardwired needs that, again, if they're met, we are the best version of ourself. And if they are not met, we are the worst version of ourself. So the first is confidence. Confidence is basically a sense that we're doing well and a sense that we're getting Better, right? We can't just do well. We have to also be growing for that to be met. The second I call choice, which keeps us authentic. It's a sense of agency and alignment in what we're doing. And then the last one is connecting, that is feeling like we belong and there's kind of mutual support. And that's in all parts of our lives. Right. We need to have a sense of connection at work. We obviously need to have choice and agency, even though a lot of organizations aren't designed to foster that. And we definitely need confidence. We need to be able to feel that what we're doing is productive and meaningful and that we're good at what we do.

B (22:47)

It made so much sense to me simply thinking about, oh, the best version of myself requires these things to be present. And what am I missing right now? Is such a useful question, I think, to, to reflect on at work. And it definitely, it definitely made me think, oh, where have I got some gaps in this at the moment?

C (23:08)

It can be as simple as, okay, what's in my environment, what's happening now that I know what these three needs are. Usually we have one need that's kind of the most thwarted. If you can identify, like, wow, this thing that happened to me with my boss today really hurt my sense of confidence. That is such a valuable insight because then, as we'll see in the last two steps, once you sort of understand how you're getting in your own way, however unintentionally, you can find new ways to get that need met.

B (23:38)

When I was reading it, I think the biggest gap that I found was probably, like, the connection. I mean, I have a lot of belonging to my company, but it's a small company. And I kind of, I think it's feeling. When I've worked in larger companies, you're belonging to so many different groups. But sometimes when you're in a small company in a big world, you can kind of feel like someone of that belonging might not be there equally. To be honest, I have been in a large company where there are lots of people, and I think you can still feel. You can still feel quite lonely in a large company.

C (24:02)

I think so many people are going to relate to what you're saying when you said, you know, being in a big company and feeling lonely. I've definitely had that experience in my previous life. So all personal experiences are valuable.

B (24:14)

So let's maybe move into the next stage of the, of the roadmap then. So we've kind of understood where we are on those One, what can we do next?

C (24:21)

Next? So I'm going to keep this next one really simple. The third step is to spot our shadows. And remember when I said that self determination theory talks about what brings out the beast in us. One thing we know from all of the research is that when our needs are being frustrated, we basically try to chase a version of that need that doesn't actually fulfill that need need. So a good example would be you're 25, you're in your first job out of maybe graduate school, you're at a new company and you know, you try to make friends with everybody, but people are just clicky, they're leaving you out. And so your trigger is that you're being left out and isolated and that really hurts or frustrates your need for connection. So whether or not you're conscious of it, you might do something like guess I just started my TikTok account, like maybe I'm going to become TikTok famous, right? So it's a well intentioned but poor substitute for the authentic experience of that need. Wait a second. When I turn into the worst version of myself, it's actually not because I'm whatever, insert the word right, insert negative word about self here. It's because that is the natural human response to our needs being thwarted. So the tool for this is actually the simplest tool in the world, but it's something that I use probably more than I would care to admit. When I'm like, wow, the way I am acting today, this is not me, the question, I call it the shadow seeking question. How is my current behavior different from when I'm at my point best? Right. How is my current behavior different from when I'm at my best? And once you've probed your pain, you've traced your triggers to the unmet need, that next piece is, you know, what is the thing that I'm chasing that is actually taking me further away from that need? And I think that question is, it's always been a slam dunk every time I've asked it.

B (26:28)

Why a confronting question. You have to really acknowledge that I am behaving in a different way at the moment and that that way is not really working for me, you know, because with resilience it's sort of carry on regardless is the message. And then I think what we're doing now is recognizing, but hang on, the way that you are approaching this is getting in the way of you getting better and that that is something that you are, you are doing. And I think just to just to take that moment to pause or reflect on that I think is quite a very, very useful, it really powerful question. But you, you have to, I think you have to be open to the insights.

C (27:07)

That's true, that's true. But I think grace and self forgiveness is the key here, right? So my mentor and friend, Marshall Goldsmith always says, you know, forgive the person that you were who did that. Right. Every breath you take, you're a new person. And I just love that because it says who I was in that moment. A is not reflective of who I am and B, doesn't have to be who I am moving forward. And I think if we've got that in our head, like we can take that insight and really do something with it.

B (27:41)

So we ask ourselves the big question and then we forgive ourselves for the response because we're trying to learn whatever.

C (27:46)

The answer is, whatever the answer, we're.

B (27:49)

Just trying to learn about ourselves. So, you know, I've got that insight about me, then what do I do with my answers to my shadows?

C (27:56)

So the last step is to pick your pivots. And what this is about is finding new ways within the constraints of our environment to better get our needs fulfilled. So pivoting is basically moving away from those old familiar shadows where we're not doing ourselves any favors and towards new ways of fulfilling our needs. There's this amazing offshoot of self determination by a woman named Neely laporte. And she came up with this idea that we are not just passive recipients of our environment to meet or not meet our needs. We can craft our own needs. We possess the power to transcend the limitations of our environment and proactively shape our own needs. Right. And so that's basically what this final step is primarily, I think the essence of this, this is picking a new goal that has been scientifically shown to help you meet that need. Right? So it has not been scientifically shown, to use our example earlier, that becoming TikTok famous meets your need for connection. However, it has been scientifically shown that if we focus on closeness, which is deepening close relationships by giving and getting support, or if we demonstrate forgiveness, where we let go of old grudges for our own well being or even spirituality, right? Connecting to something greater than ourselves. Those are all examples of, you know, if we pivot away from that shadow and towards one of these goals, that is where you start to get on the path of need fulfillment, regardless of what's happening around you. Right? So in this example, our friend might decide to look outside of work for Connections, right. Maybe call up an old friend from college and catch up with them or spend more time with their friends outside of work. I just love this idea of need crafting. It's pretty new. It really didn't come around until about 2019 and 2020 and I think it's pretty revolutionary.

B (30:04)

I mentioned that I was thinking, oh, connections, where I've got the gap. And it really made me think about what are my. The actions that I'm doing at the moment which are actually helping to solve that to things that we've talked about, the sort of shadow actions. And it made me think about, okay, to create more belonging, I am going to reconnect with someone from my past that makes me feel connected to the me outside of work. I'm going to connect to somebody within my present who gives me energy and sort of knows me and what I'm doing. And then I also thought I'm going to create a connection with someone for my future. So kind of the thing that I want to do and I don't know whether that's a scientifically proven thing, but I did just think about it was about the quality of my relationships and spending time one to one with people rather than I spend a lot of time one to many where I don't aspire to be TikTok famous, but I do spend quite a lot of time on LinkedIn as people.

C (30:52)

Yeah, don't we all.

B (30:54)

But I just thought about, oh, how do I deepen and create more belonging with the one to one relationships across those different contexts to give me what I ultimately need, the connection that I'm looking for.

C (31:06)

That's beautiful. Yeah. And actually one interesting thing I learned in the research for this book is it's about mutual support. So what happens is if we're giving more support than we're getting or if we're getting more support than we're giving, those relationships tend to be sort of imbalanced and less fulfilling. So one way to look at it, and this is definitely something that like me as an overly busy person needs to think about, is not just like who can I reconnect with, but who can I serve? Right. My friends that are letting me go in my book hole for five years and not mad at me that I, that I'm not keeping up with them, like who do I need to reach back out to and give support to that also fulfills that connection need. And when the relationship is balanced, that's really optimal.

B (31:54)

I really like that closing point around actually helping other people. So that mutuality of support can also enable people to be at their best too. Would you have any closing advice? So for someone that's listening to this now and they're relating to it in the same way that I did when I was reading the book, would there be anything you would say? Okay, so the first thing that you do after listening to this, what would you direct them to do?

C (32:20)

I just want to share one of my favorite quotes. When the winds of change rage, some people build shelters and other people build windmills. And for me, that has become really a guiding force in my life. You know, whatever fresh chaos erupts. After you finish listening to this podcast, ask yourself, am I going to build a shelter or am I going to build a windmill? And not in a way that we're oversimplifying or romanticizing the horrible things that can happen to us, but to say I can either use this as a force to retreat or I can use this as a force to propel myself forward. So that's the philosophical thing. The practical thing is that starting on April 1st, which is the release date for Shatterproof in the UK, I think it might be a couple days later. But April 1st, everywhere we have a free five minute resilient ceiling quiz where you actually take it. You can actually even send it to someone who knows you if you want to, to get their feedback. And what you get back is this report that kind of gives you an idea of where are your resilience resources and what can you do about it. All of our early feedback people are, they're just loving it. So if anybody wants to take that, it's at resilience-quiz. Com.

B (33:40)

Brilliant. And we will put it in a pod sheet so that everybody who wants to start there, they can easily find it. And we'll put it in the show notes as well so that everyone can get to that quiz. Tasha, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I think, you know, you talked about the language being important. I think the language that you've created makes this conversation so much easier and it's really sticky and memorable. So just a thank you, a thank you for me for your time and for sharing your story and your insights with our audience.

C (34:06)

Such a pleasure. Helen, thank you. Thank you for everything.

A (34:12)

Thank you so much for listening to this discussion today between me and Tasha. I hope you found it useful. I hope it's made you think a little bit about what becoming shatterproof might mean for you and and would love your feedback on the episode. So please do email us helenand Sarah squigglycareers.com and then Sarah and I will be back together, diving into another squiggly careers topic next week on the podcast. So we'll be back with you again then. Thanks so much everyone.