Resilience In Pivotal Moments: Getting Unstuck From The Status Quo Bias With Sandra Halling

Well, when I was 9, maybe 11, I don't know, somewhere around there, I announced to my family that I was going to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, but after I finished being a prima ballerina. That was my life plan when I was like 9, right?

That's a good life plan.

It's a good life plan, right? So I have not achieved either of those aspirations yet, but it's a good analogy or kind of metaphor for like who I am and how I show up in the world because both I'm not afraid of a lofty goal, like never have been, probably never will be. And that feeds into the story that we'll talk about today, just my journey. But also I really value both detail-oriented things, but also things that are technical and intelligent and intellectual. There's like threads there that I have woven together throughout my journey and my career that just show up on repeat.

Interesting. Yeah. I'm going to sit with that for just a second without creating too much pause in our conversation. But what you said there about there being these threads, commonalities, common denominators, if you will, I think that's true for all of us. I think a lot of things repeat. We don't always see the similarities. I think you've really got to do a bit of sitting quietly and a bit of self-analysis and develop more self-awareness to actually be able to see those common threads, whether it's in how relationships succeed or how they fail or in other struggles, other challenges you've had in your life. They're usually not random and you can usually not too— it takes a minute, but you can create some connection points between those things. You're nodding up and down.

100%. Yeah. Yeah, it's never random. In fact, in the Community that I run, we do this exercise often where we write our life stories backwards. So you start with where you are and you ask yourself, well, what's the most recent sort of pivotal moment that led me to where I am right now? And then you do that again and again. You kind of work your way backwards because it starts to help you rewrite the narrative that the things that may have happened to you in your life that required— particularly things that required change or resiliency— were air So you can do this process and you can pick positive pivotal moments, but you can also do it and pick challenging pivotal moments. And it can be so enlightening and it takes a lot of pressure off and kind of helps us just reframe. Like a perfect example is I met my partner through my best— at my best friend's wedding, and they wouldn't have been together if they hadn't met through my ex-husband. So there's like these threads in our lives, like who could have predicted all of that would unfold? So anyway, I think that nothing is random really is where I was going with that.

I mean, I'm in the non-randomness camp and I know there's some people that believe differently about that and I'm totally respectful of that way of thinking. Sure, sure, sure, sure. For sure. I actually had a heated conversation with my son-in-law about that just Just last night, funny enough. But I remember earlier on in my career, I got my 4-year degree, got a degree in English, didn't know what to do with that, was searching for kind of a purpose at that time. I was, you know, all of 22 years old or something. And I took a job as a teacher. Wow. And I taught middle school English for the city of New York when they were, and I think still are, always looking for teachers. You didn't need to have an ed degree to teach there and get paid pretty decently. So I took it. I did it for a couple of years, which was wonderful, exhausting, but wonderful work. And I remember telling the kids as we were going through some of the curriculum, you know, like the poetry and things, and they're like, ah, Mr. Markel, poetry, God, that sucks. And I'm thinking, when I was your age, that's exactly what I thought. It's like, just kill me now if I had to listen to another Robert Frost poem or whatever. And at that time, of course, I hadn't even heard any Robert Frost poems, but just the thought of it was just— So I had a pretty high bar or hurdle, I thought at the time, to kind of keep these kids or get these kids interested. And one of the things I said to them back then when I was just a baby myself, and I'm still a baby, I think we all are, but maybe an older baby, let's say, or more seasoned baby, more wrinkly baby. I said to them, life is a really wonderful thing that is not random. It's really a thing. I think the higher skillset and the higher degree of difficulty, if you will, is to find the connection points between things. If you can find those connection If you can create sort of the connection of the dots, then you're gonna experience so much more outta life, more joy, more success, and all that stuff. And I don't remember, of course, the words I used exactly then, but it was this idea that I wanted them to see that there was a connection potentially between that poem or that thing that they didn't understand and other areas of their life. And of course, I was doing The Road Less Traveled back then. It was a poem about making choices and pivots. I wrote a book later on in my life called Pivot. All about that. So I totally in that camp. And, and I wanna start with, in just following the breadcrumbs here with you, that exercise that you do with your community. So I'm gonna turn that question on you. So what is one thing, a recent situation in your life where it's pivotal in some way, shape, or form, whether for the, as you say, something really great's happened that's pivotal, or where it's just brought out more resiliency in you because you had to—

Yeah. Yeah, so I would say, I mean, this really connects to my work if I look at it from a macro perspective. And that is that I kind of quasi-jokingly call myself a recovering corporate consultant in the sense that corporate consulting is exhausting depending on how you do it. And one of the things that happened in kind of my recent history with the pandemic, and we moved right around then, there were just a lot of personal life upheaval type things going on. And I had to take a pause and a step back and reevaluate who I was trying to become and what it was I was trying to do. There was like a lot of identity questions that were coming up, and it was kind of a blessing in disguise. Like at the, in the moment when the pandemic first happened and all my leads dried up, people I'd talked to for 20 years, like on and off doing work together, just radio silent. And like intellectually, I know it wasn't like me, air quote, right? But that's still a hard thing to go through in the moment because the world is just It was so, so crazy. And none of us knew what was really going to happen.

Triggers all this fear. I mean,

totally.

I mean, I think that's across the board what it triggered. I mean, there were CEOs of Fortune 50 companies that were literally shitting their pants about what's going to happen or where things were going to go. And anybody that thinks that's not the case, we're a few minutes past that moment now, but that's what was going on. I mean, you pick, take from Warren Buffett on Up or Down. Everybody was in that same boat of just feeling a tremendous amount of fear in the uncertainty.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and as awful as it was in some contexts, like in other ways, we were very lucky in the grand scheme of what a pandemic could be, which is a sort of a scary thing to think about too. But at any rate, I view it as a blessing in disguise because it forced me to take a step back and reevaluate my work. And I shifted in that moment and I started working more with solopreneurs and helping them do pretty much the same things I've been doing for years, CRM, email marketing. like marketing systems and technology. And it's really fulfilling. Like, I just really enjoy having the diversity in client base. And I really needed the kick in the pants to make the shift too. Like, that's not an easy shift to make, I think, independently.

Yeah. Oh my God. Everything you're saying is just dropping in for me. And I'm trying to think in my mind which story I want to contribute so that you didn't have to answer that alone. I mean, look, we have a status quo bias. This is a term Mm-hmm. That people maybe have heard it or not heard it, but basically it's that whole thing that when the choice is given between staying the way we are or things staying the way they are and things changing to, to some degree that we can't predict, we almost always opt for the devil that we know. And that it's counterintuitive when you examine it, when you take it apart and look at it scientifically speaking or intellectually speaking, but on a visceral personal, mental, emotional level, it's nothing but just triggering of fear. So to challenge that without the kick in the pants, meaning to break that status quo bias without a catalyst, is just not the norm. That's— there's a very small percentage. Yeah. I would say it's less than 5% that will do that.

Yeah. I even remember one time I read this article and it's kind of a sad story, but it figures in like just how we're wired physiologically. Like if you have a child or a baby who's in an abusive home, they still want to stay in with the caregiver that they know. And part of that, they're too young to understand cognitively what's gonna happen if they leave, but that's still our wiring. It's like we're safer with known surroundings. Like as humans, that's what we believe. And change can feel like a threat, even if it's really positive movement in a good direction.

Yeah. I mean, it's the reason why the start of this book that I wrote, Change Proof, is a scene at the beach where a person is caught in a rip current. I was a lifeguard at a beach for many, many summers, luckily enough, in my— when I was younger. And we would see it all the time as lifeguards that there was a certain change in the facial— literally, the face would change of a person that all of a sudden realized that they were caught in a rip current. Mm-hmm. We used to call them sucks. That was the term that Lifeguards in my day used for that and probably still do. But when they got sucked out from the shore and they were in 3 feet, now they're in 6 feet or, or deeper water, their facial expression, everything changed. And you could tell whether somebody was going to run out of gas and be a drowning— like somebody that you're saving from drowning. And in that instant, we were proactive. We got in the water with our buoy and got to them before the panic struck them. And if we didn't get there Quickly enough and the panic had struck, it was a, it was a real save. The other times it was just kind of get on the buoy. I'm just gonna get you, get you outta this problem. And of course, you know, it's funny, you bring 'em in, you bring 'em to a place where they were safe or whatever. They literally would turn their back on you like you didn't, like they never saw you in their life because it was embarrassing on some level. They were panicking, needed help, but as soon as they were safe, they were like, ah, thanks so much.

Appreciate it. Yeah. That nervous system, man, like it has to regulate somehow. So yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll turn the question on myself and just quickly say that the concept of having a, like a change that's required on some level that you ignore is something that I can relate to. I was the CEO of a company for a number of years after I pivoted out of being a full-time attorney. I practiced in law for about 18 years and then made a pivot, wrote a book about that called Pivot to talk about this life transition, career transition, reinvention, et cetera. And then that gig that I was in for number of years, just went sour and south and in the end needed to exit. And it started out in my mind being about my choosing to do that, but then I paused because I got scared and didn't actually have the courage to just change the situation. Like you said earlier, it was a crappy one, but yet it was familiar and it provided some level of stability for me. And I had all the reasons why I needed stability. I was father, husband, kids, colleges. I mean, the usual stuff, right?

Mm-hmm.

But I paused and I chickened out. And then the universe just said, okay, nope, that's not the way this is gonna work. And I ended up having to leave because I was asked to.

Mm-hmm.

And I had to reexamine my own identity. And part of that was, ironically enough, reading my book or not reading it. I listened to it, which was just brutal to like go out on walks. I can imagine. In the middle of the afternoon. Yeah. Because I'm out of a job and I'm listening to my own words talk to me about reexamining my identity. Entering this thing we called the, referred to as the pivot phone booth.

Mm-hmm.

And then deciding what is that identity. So it's, it's really interesting to be 5 or 6 years on the other side of that really pivotal moment. And I've had many micro pivots in between. Look, when the pandemic hit, I'm a public speaker and a consultant. And as you said, everything just shut down. People didn't even know you could do a, an event virtually at that point. Yeah. Like they were just figuring out, oh, We can operate our businesses this way. It was like—

Yeah, it's so hysterical. Like, yeah, 15 years of consulting with corporate clients, no one ever wanted to turn on their camera until the pandemic. And now suddenly all wanted to do video calls. It was just, it was like, yeah, it was really fascinating to see how fast the world changed when they had to, which is part of what you're saying in your story, right? Like when you had to, when you were forced to leave the job, it causes this reckoning and I think there's also a thread there for me. What's resonating for me is this idea of like, it sounds like when you're telling the story, an inkling that maybe you could have or ought to have made that choice for yourself before you got to that point where you were asked to leave, right? And we can see those moments, but we'll make that choice to stay where we are because it feels like the safer choice, right? But maybe that's kind of a delusion on our part, right? Like, is it actually safer, or is it safer to follow, consistently follow our own inner wisdom? Right? Because I don't know about you, but I've never had a moment where I had a strong intuition about something, trusted it, and then regretted it later.

Never.

Like, it doesn't always play out the way I think it will, but I don't regret it because there's always some like, oh, I'm glad I listened to that because I wouldn't have seen this thing and then this wouldn't have happened.

Sandra, you're making the hair stand up on my skin.

Yeah.

That's— yes, exactly. Holy smokes. Yeah. I mean, going back to that rip current analogy for a second, the thing about a rip current is that it eventually Spits you out. People don't know that, or some do and some don't. But there's a way out of a rip current that doesn't involve waiting for the lifeguard to come and pull you out. That's okay. If you need the help, you should take the help. And I've needed help, and I've accepted it. And I'm better at receiving that kind of thing now than I've ever been before. But there's also this other opportunity, which is to just relax. Like you said earlier, pause, and to take a beat, and to consult, as you just said. So in the book again, I'm referring back to the book. I apologize for all the self-serving promotion here. In the book, we talk about pause. Ask, choose. It's just so uncanny how what you're saying is really just such a part of my own belief system and even the things that I share with people to this day. That pause is so fundamentally important to just take a moment, ask yourself, what is my inner guidance here? Is my inner guidance that I should stick around as long as I possibly can or stick around until somebody else realizes this is not a fit? Or do I trust my own instincts that this is not a fit? And that there's something better in store for me. And that, of course, there's a lot of better options. And certainly I wouldn't feel the way I'm feeling if there wasn't this other opportunity that was calling out.

Something was there. Yeah. I like your point about receiving help in that too, because I can't tell you how many times when I, it's usually, it's not at the beginning or even at the end, but it's like a third or halfway through. a consulting agreement, usually with solopreneurs— this doesn't happen with corporate clients, but with solopreneurs— at some point admit purely on their own accord that the hardest part about saying yes to the project was admitting that they needed the help.

Yeah.

Right? Like, that was the hardest part. It wasn't even necessarily spending the money on themselves, although sometimes that comes up. But it was like admitting that they wanted the help, that they were in over their heads. Like, we're taught this sort of like rugged individualism. I don't think it works, frankly. Like, just to be blunt about it, it doesn't work. Like, it puts us in a position where not only are we not prepared to receive help, but we sometimes we don't even know how to offer help because we're so used to it not being accepted. Or I think it makes selling services tricky because it figures into that. Like, selling is a form of helping. If you're not offering your products and services in a genuine way, like, people don't know that you can solve that problem for them. Like, that's what selling is really. It's a form of helping. Yes. Because we have these hangups about receiving help and giving, we also have hangups around selling. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think there's a correlation there.

I do too. I think there's a psychology that we probably won't use this show to get into deeply. We could do it another time. But, but because enrollment and we sell our corporate services and in a variety of ways, keynote services, workshop services, and we do longer-term engagements through our company WorkWell. And those conversations are, if I'm not somebody that Is willing to accept, receive help myself, if I don't value the help of others in my life, it's a projection that doesn't work in my favor when I'm enrolling or attempting to enroll someone else in buying my services or our company's services to help them. Right. It's a disconnect. So yeah, it's such a really interesting point you're making there. I want to go back to Something else too, which is the resiliency component, because this show is in many ways centers around resiliency, personal and professional resiliency. And I was a lawyer for 18 years and it was literally killing me, or I thought it was killing me. If I knew then what I know now, I probably could have stayed in the practice and done it for a length of time more successfully. But I stopped doing that work even though I had a very successful practice, because in my story, It was leading to something not good. And I give myself credit for pivoting that time before the universe gave me a bigger message. Right? And so my question to you is, you know, when it comes to how you've managed to pivot out of— so I'm almost recovered, fully recovered attorney. Right? And you describe yourself as a recovered consultant. I wanna know what's been the recovery component for you? Because when we define resilience, we define it not as grit or grinding because that leads only to more exhaustion, which is what we're seeing in the workplace everywhere. Mm-hmm. We define it as recovery. How is it that you recover? And when you create the specific recovery rituals, then that's how you create longevity for anyone in any, basically any situation. So what's been your recovery go-to and how have you maintained or created resilience in your personal and professional life?

I love this question. So I'm a big fan of alliteration. So I have all these frameworks that pop into my head when I hear that. So the one that I think is most applicable though is What I call the 3 Ps. So it's persistent action, patience, and I'm totally going to draw a blank on the third one. I love how I'm doing that to myself. I'll talk about the 2 and it'll pop into my head. So persistent action is really about leaning into the idea that we can't truly be consistent all the time. My personal belief, I think consistency is actually a lot harder than we make it out to be. That's number one. So persistent action just pulls back the needle a little bit. And so coming from law and corporate consulting, there is this expectation of like utterly perfect consistency. And if we just allow ourselves a little bit more humanity and it's like, what if I was persistent instead? Like I just kept showing up even if it was imperfect, what would that look like?

So persistence instead of perfection. I freaking love that. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a really interesting play there.

Or even persistence instead of consistency because the P that I was forgetting is this idea of perfectionism, right? When we think about perfectionism, my view on it is that it's actually a closed-loop cycle. It's like a merry-go-round you're not getting off. Because we set the bar so high, we don't achieve it, so then we're hard on ourselves, so then it makes it even harder to take action the next time. And you rinse and repeat your way through this. And so persistent action certainly is a doorway out. It's like, oh, what if I could reduce the expectations for myself? And this is a really hard thing for some of us to grapple with. I had one of the women in my community said to me, we were recording an episode for my show that's gonna come out this fall, and she's like, lowering the bar is the kindest thing we can do for ourselves. And she like didn't understand that for herself until she did the planning and productivity work with me. It's like lowering the bar really is a form of compassion and self- So perfection is kind of the second one. It's like, how do we get ourselves out of that? It really boils down to lowering the bar and allowing ourselves to be creative and curious with what we might create instead of whatever version it was that we might have come up with at first pass. It's like, is there a more interesting version that might be slightly less effort that we could finish sooner, get feedback on, and iterate more quickly? Right.

I mean, I remember somebody saying this some years ago. He said sloppy— he prefers sloppy success over perfect mediocrity. And I think, yeah, perfect mediocrity, that's just— nobody's after that. No,

no.

So I think what you're saying is that persistent action is a way to overcome this perfect mediocrity, if you will, because you're constantly— you're getting feedback all the time. And some of that feedback is not great, but a lot of it just teaches you enough to move on. Right? I mean, think about professional golfers. It's just been dawning on me lately because I've been into golf of late, more of late, and they lose almost all the time. These are successful, really successful athletes in the world, you know, make good money, and they play all the time, but they lose almost all the time.

Right.

You think about how you have to manage your mindset and a lot of other things to be able to get out, go on the course after week after week after week, Of not winning. You go, wow, okay.

Golf takes a very intense mindset. That is a true statement. And it's funny because it's a great segue to the 3rd P, which is patience. And the reason I say it's the 3rd one, that's on purpose, because what I find is that the process of persistent action and the process of unwinding the perfectionism is, A, slow, but B, iterative. And to do something that's slow and requires iteration also requires patience. Being patient with ourselves when we catch ourselves being hard on ourselves, being patient with ourselves when we're setting the bar so high that it's not achievable again, and then we have to recalibrate. It helps support the other 2 goals because we're going to do these 3 things imperfectly also.

So true. My God, I love your language, by the way. I just want to say that. Thank you. That's why we wanted to have you on the show because I just vibe with your language. And we have a lot of closed-loop systems, I think, inside of our heads, right? We're constantly in a spiral of thinking. And do you have a strategy that helps you to break that loop, if you will?

Yeah, absolutely. I have lots of strategies for this, but my favorite is doing a weekly review. So that's a very common— if you're in the productivity circle, I'm sure you've heard of it. It came from— I think it came from David Allen's Getting Things Done like 20 years ago. At least that's where I learned it. And what I will say is that there's lots of templates floating around on the internet. I have one. I'm happy to share it. We can put it in the show notes for people if they want to check it out.

Yeah.

My approach, I think, is a little more relational. It's not just task management. So a lot of the ones you see on the internet and YouTube and whatever, they're very task-oriented. And I ask questions that are more about your holistic self, like how are you showing up for the people in your life, your direct reports, your spouse, your kids, your partner, whomever? Are you going to practice self-care next week? Like body, mind, spirit. Where is that on the calendar? Did we put it on the calendar first? And it's just these like little nudges because you mentioned earlier in the show about thinking about your future self. And we do that a lot too in my community. And I'm always asking them like, what is going to take you 1% closer to the future you that you're trying to create?

Mm-hmm.

It's not about 10% or 50%. It's like 1%. Incremental change over time is what is sustainable, and it's also more doable in the moment. Like, if we go from couch and Netflix, just to use the clichéd analogy, couch and Netflix to the gym 5 days a week, we're more likely to hurt ourselves and burn out than we are to achieve any sort of fitness or health-related goal. But if we're like, you know what I'm going to do? Every day after lunch, I'm going to go for a walk for half an hour, and then a month after that, you add in some yoga or whatever, but you decide What's that small change that you can make that you can actually do persistently, like without perfection and having patience when you are imperfect about it? Like kind of tying those 2 strategies together. That's my process really for making pretty much anything I want in my life happen. Like I have people in my community who have like cut their hours and doubled their revenue and it's like just sort of mind-blowing what happens because Because really what they're doing, to your point in your process in your book, is like they're pausing. They're pausing to check in, right? Like that makes all the difference in the world.

And the ask is that next piece of it. Pause, ask, and then choose. And what you're showing us, and I love what you just did, was you gave us some questions because we're not all that great at asking questions. Now, I say that in a way that sounds like I know everybody and I don't. I'm just going by my experience, which I think is Like all of our experiences are nothing but universal. So what did I learn in school was that if I asked questions, it meant I was— didn't know the answers. And I can go on and on. But so if I didn't know the answer, then I was not as smart as somebody else in the class. Mm-hmm. I wasn't as smart as somebody else in the class, then I was not as popular or I got made fun of or the teacher didn't give me a good grade. Like, and on and on and on. And what we learn a lot of the times is to just keep our mouths shut. Unless you do have the answer, then that's fine. But then what are you doing? Because if you have the answers, then what are you curious about? What are you actually learning? Yeah. So being a show-off to get attention, it wasn't the goal then, even though that you saw that happen. It's not the goal now. It's remaining curious and learning new things that leads to greater and greater results. And even that, to your point, is what incremental improvement is all about. Constant, never-ending improvement. It's incremental. And incremental improvement creates exponential results over time. That's what it does. It's— that's what's transformational. That's the hockey stick. That's the compounding effect that Einstein called the great miracle. You know, in life is a compound— the compound effect. But that questioning is, again, because we're taught to not ask questions, especially the ones that we don't even have an inkling about, like the big questions.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you gave us a couple of questions already. Are there some other questions that you—

100%. I was just gonna say I should give you my best questions while we're on this topic.

We have to.

Yeah, asking good questions is an art form. And so some of my favorites are, well, the first one I'll ask is actually kind of the hardest, but let's start there because I think it's juicy. And that is, what is your déjà vu goal? What's the goal you put on your list over and over again, but you haven't achieved yet? And how would it feel if you put it at the top of the list and took everything else off Or let it go completely. What's your déjà vu goal? Because what it does is it forces us to reckon with that naggy thought in the back of our head that we're gonna do whatever the thing is, right? Even though we haven't actually taken any action on it yet. And it also forces us, I think, to kind of reckon with our own sort of mortality in a way. Like we only have so many like years in our lives to achieve big monumental goals. And the sooner we start, the sooner we're on the path.

Yeah.

Right.

Hey, I got a great idea for, cuz we maybe 5 to 10 minutes that's remaining here. I would love it if we go back and forth with some of our favorite questions and then we'll leave a little space at the end. But I'm just thinking if I'm a listener right now, I would really dig that.

Yeah, go for it.

Let's do it. So, all right, so I'll give one and then you go back and then we'll do back and forth. All right. So one of my favorite questions is the question, what don't I see? And I heard this question some years ago and I thought, oh my God, this is just such a great question because there's always something And many things that are in our blind spot. They're things that we just don't know about ourselves. So it's a question about, of course, it's a question to me that's about humility because it just again is saying, I need help or would love help actually to see those things that I cannot see and to know what some of those things are, to have that self-awareness or aware, a greater consciousness around me means that there's just creative opportunities galore, like more than I could even want or imagine myself even handling. So what don't I see? I think it's like asking for feedback, and I personally don't believe you can ask a question, not get an answer. I think there's a cause and effect relationship between those 2 things, and the only thing that I can't predict is when you get the answer. Ask a simple question, you're probably going to get an answer pretty quickly because it's simple. You ask a complicated question, you're going to get an answer. It just may, it may take a minute.

It may take a minute. Yeah. I appreciate that. I tend to agree with that assessment.

So, your next favorite question?

So, my next favorite question is, what's at risk? And it can be that simple, like what's at risk? But often I'll say it as, what's at risk if you do? And what's at risk if you don't?

Love that.

Right? Because it forces us to like face sort of opportunity costs or the potential consequences of the 2 things. Or multiple things that we're contemplating, right?

Yeah. When you put your scenario, you're creating sort of a future casting of what-ifs. What-ifs, they think people think what-ifs are terrible, but no, they're good. They're good.

What-ifs are imperative, I think. So this is like pro tip to just insert in these questions. If you find yourself in that mental loop of what-if questions in your head or what-if thoughts, the kind of secret sauce is to play the scenario all the way out. So what if you lost your job and your house and your car and your wife left you? And like, what if? Keep going. Just keep going. Play it all the way out, right?

I do this with people too.

Right? Like, it's like, first of all, it starts to become comical at a certain point. It takes the stress off the question, right? But also, like, even if it doesn't go too wild, like, they start to see how resourceful they are in the moment, whomever you're asking it of. And it kind of calms that sense of like, oh, Like, there might be things at risk here, but I'm going to figure it out.

Totally. I'm drawing a blank on the author, but I'm going to look it up really fast. So, all right, I'm going to do this. There's a book called 10% Happier, and it's Dan Harris. That's who it is. So Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier, he poses— and it's a very comical, great book, by the way. I highly recommend this book. He poses this scenario where all of his what-ifs will always end in the same way. He's homeless, broke, of course, like, just barely alive in like Des Moines, Iowa. My forgiveness, or I beg forgiveness of the people of Des Moines. But in Dan's book, I think it's Des Moines or someplace in Minnesota or whatever, but someplace that he just goes. That's where he always ends up. He's just like broke. He's homeless. He's on the streets. And like, you know, Somewhere. And I think when you play that out, as you said, and I, I will do this with clients when I feel like they're so stuck in that status quo bias, you know, they're so fearful of making a change. They said, just tell me, play it out. I just want you to go to the nth, like to the end of whatever the worst scenario is you could possibly concoct. There's only one place that is the ultimate endpoint as the worst case for everybody. It's always the same thing for everybody. Mm-hmm. For you, me, Everybody. And that is death. That's it. I mean, it could be embarrassment. It could be death by a thousand cuts, you know, where you're humiliated and you lose all your friends and everybody thinks you're crap, and then you die, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's excruciating. But when we play it out to that degree, we can always pull back from that and realize rationally that I'm not likely to die because I have to give a speech and stand up in front of a bunch of people, or I gotta pitch to a group of folks that I've never, you know, like, and I've never pitched before, whatever. It's just so interesting that you brought that up. So that's just a great question. I'm gonna use a question. We've got a couple minutes here that my wife always asks me, and I love this question, which is, what is the creative opportunity?

And if you— That's juicy. Yeah.

Just, you put yourself in any scenario where you're a bit uncertain, or again, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. We're living with tremendous A volume of unknowns we've never really experienced before, and they're paraded in front of us all day long, every day as well. Like, so what's the creative opportunity in that moment, wherever you find yourself situated? And when I ask myself that question, it's a great— to use your word earlier, it's a great reframe. Yeah. It's an immediate way to see whatever's happening and be after the nugget, the, the little gem, as my grandmother would call call it, of wisdom, of knowledge, of learning, of something that will be a catalyst for growth down the road. Viktor Frankl wrote this amazing book called Man's Search for Meaning, and many people have read it, have heard of it. Viktor Frankl was a concentration camp survivor. He was in a camp where people were being executed, were disappearing all around him, and the likelihood that he would survive was infinitesimally small. And yet his mindset as a very young person watching this, experiencing this, was someday I'm going to be able to share the lessons and the experience of this, and it's going to help people. And he started to work on his meaning therapy, which he became very well known for in that scenario. To be able to look at that and go, in the midst of this is the most brutal what-if scenario you could probably come up with. He was already thinking outside of the literal prison that he was in to what it would mean to other people. And then And again, magically, miraculously, he survives. When they liberate that concentration camp, he goes about living again and then starts to share this and changes people's lives by the millions after that.

You

go, wow. That's, to me, the definition of how you seize a creative opportunity out of seemingly the worst.

What strikes me about that is there's 2 things. One is creativity and curiosity are like Like such useful tools in our toolbox, no matter what's going on. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is that hope is, I think, the most important emotion, right? Because when you have hope, there's also possibility. There's an opening for more creativity and curiosity. And when the hope starts to dissipate, or if you can't quite grasp it, that's when we start to see things in binary, which I'm gonna throw out my question. here, which is, what is the third option?

Hmm.

What is the third option? I learned that one from a dear friend, and I just think it's so brilliant because our minds tend to categorize and we come up with these either-ors. And just by asking that, like, what's the third option? Almost always I will come up with 5 options. Like, it just unlocks the creativity thought train.

Oh, wow. I'm writing that one down. I love it. Yeah. All right. So my last question is going to be directed to you.

All right.

This would be a good way for us to conclude here today. I want to know if there's some common thread. So you ask yourself, Sandra, what's the common thread, if there is one that I can detect in the moment? What's the common thread that's existed in my career or my, or some other area of my personal life? I'll give you the binary choice there for you. Or choose a third option if you like.

Yeah, choose a third option. I'm going to choose the third option, I feel like, because I think it's both. What I'm detecting is like a desire for greater self-awareness.

Love it. So that's the common thread in both of those other scenarios, personally, professionally.

Yeah, I love it.

I asked myself this question a time ago, and the answer that I came up with was, teaching, being a teacher of a sort. So when I looked back at my history, teacher at one point, I was a lawyer for 18-odd years, and then I was running a personal development training company and speaking on behalf and writing programs for that. And then when we created our company, Workwell, and the work that we do now is in the area of training corporate people to treat their employees and get more, but by better treatment, by focusing more on wellness and resiliency, et cetera. But the common thread in all of that, and Even in the authorship, in the book writing and things, has just been about teaching. And so being an educator, that's been the common thread for me. So I love that question because I think when you do see what the threads are, it's like, for me, it was easier to go, so to what extent when you have a myriad of options, and that can also create its own paralysis, right? Where you just don't know what to do because there's so many things you could do. Mm-hmm. That what's the common thread question, I think, is helpful to narrow Things to a point where you go, this either is in alignment, congruent with that, or nah.

Yeah. It helps you to narrow the choices and the options on your next move for sure.

Like ballerina. What were the 2 things you started with?

Ballerina and a lawyer.

Right. So you go, eh, it would've been cool, but nah, not really. Maybe not.

Yeah.

Right.

I don't know. It's funny.

Sandra, I've so enjoyed this conversation. I could literally talk to you for days. So thank you for being on the show. We'll have full show notes. Everybody's used to that, knows that. So we'll find out more about the work that you are doing in the world. But I will say feelmoreproductive.com is the website. I know people will go anyway, but I wanna say it out loud. And, of course, we would love your help. Sandra and I both would love for you, if there's somebody that would benefit from hearing this conversation, please share it with a friend, share it with a colleague. That's helpful to us as well. And the other thing you could do is to to actually rate the show in whatever platform you're consuming this podcast. Let's just say, for example, it's iTunes or Spotify or something, and you get the option of giving it a 5-star rating. What that does is helps this show make it in front of more people. The algorithm is what we're talking about here. And yes, I'm asking for your help, support, et cetera, and I'm all good to do that. I hope you do the same. So we appreciate that. And of course, if you've got a comment or a Questions. Wow. We focused a lot on questions today. You go to adammarkel.com/podcast, leave your question or your comment there for Sandra and/or myself, and we will answer that as well. So again, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, really just a joy to speak with you today. So thank you.

Thank you, Adam. I had a great time too.

Well, holy smokes, that conversation with Sandra. Man, it was just so rich. It went in a number of really cool directions. And I absolutely love— to me, that is the joy in doing this actually, is that there's just this opportunity for an organic conversation between people that see the world the way they see it. Sometimes it's a similar perception of the world, sometimes it's different. But the way those 2 things overlap, kind of the Venn diagram, if you will, that you can track in these conversations is just thrilling to me. It's exciting. I'm curious. I learned so much. I love a lot of the way the conversations just sort of are happening organically. We're following these breadcrumbs, et cetera. So, a couple of things that we talked about today. First of all, the power of questions. I will not soon forget how we spent a good chunk of the last part of this conversation just back and forth asking these questions, sharing, actually sharing our favorite questions with all of you. It is definitely a part of the model in Change Proof, the book and the digital product, that we have to pause, ask, and choose. And the ask component is difficult for people often because we don't ask questions for a variety of reasons, which we talk about during the podcast, the what-if scenarios and other things, as well as the feeling that somehow we're not as worthy or deserving if we don't have all the answers and all that good stuff. So we cover that. We talk about how it is that we sometimes question our identities and pivotal times in our lives when we've got to make a change, that we often are stuck in status quo bias, that we're often stuck in this closed-loop system that keeps us doing the same thing over and over again, and as the old saying goes, expecting somehow that we'll get a different result. We talked about resiliency and how we develop resiliency, and San just shared with us these 3 really interesting pieces of it, how important it is to take persistent action and why that is. How do we unwind the perfectionism that often has us stuck in that one of those loops of doing nothing or just settling for mediocrity? And how it is that we, in both of those scenarios, really must have patience and the requirement and the benefit to having patience. We talked about the common threads and how important it is to identify the common thread in our personal lives as well as in our professional lives. And what Sandra had asked was, what is the third option? And that as a question leads us in a different direction. So the third option there is that it's not even either or, it's actually both. We talked some of the moments in our lives when we've been caused to pause, when a pause was required and the pause ultimately led us someplace special. We talked about the importance of incremental gain and how incremental gain over time produces transformational outcomes and the need for hope. My wife likes to ask me sometimes, and a question that I didn't ask during the podcast but is coming to mind right now, Do you have a hopeful heart in this moment? Are you feeling that you have— are you feeling your hopeful heart? Because so often we can get into a cynical or even skeptical mode, which sometimes healthy skepticism is really important, but we can often lose sight of hope. And when we do that, I think it erodes a lot of the joy for living and the joy for the work that we do in the world, et cetera. So we chat a little bit about that as well. We make some references to some of the wisdom in some other other books like 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Just some really good stuff. You're going to love sharing this episode, and I hope that you will share this episode with friends and colleagues and other people that you know and give us that 5-star rating as well. And in this moment, if you've not determined your own resiliency, whatever your in-the-moment snapshot in time resiliency score is mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually, then you can do that by going resilience rank dot com resilience rank dot com it'll take you just thirty minutes it's entirely free it'll give you not only your score in each of those four resilient zones but it'll also give you access to some really wonderful tools and resources that are entirely complimentary as well so I want to wish you a great rest of your day whatever it is that you're doing today this evening wherever you are in the world I want you to stay resilient and I can't wait to see you. And I hope to see you again sometime soon on another Change Proof podcast episode. Thank you.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, Visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.