Struggle: Your New Leadership Superpower with Grace Marshall #89

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor. This week we're thrilled to be joined by productivity ninja Grace Marshall, who's here to talk to Gary about struggle, how we can reframe the idea of struggle and our approach to it, and how to spot and leverage the hidden opportunities that our own struggles can present to us if we know where to look. Grace is the author of 3 books, the latest of which, appropriately named Struggle, is out now. With a free chapter available for download over on Grace's website, gracemarshall.com. Gary, Grace, over to you.

Hey Grace, welcome to The Company Doctor.

Thanks so much for having me, Gary.

Oh, it's great to have you on. Looking forward to this topic today. We're going to be talking about struggle. I noticed the book in the background, but I thought what would be great, uh, you're well known to a lot of people, but to people that don't know you, quick intro to yourself.

Absolutely. So my name is Grace Marshall. I am a productivity ninja. I know that you've had my colleague Graham him on the podcast before. So yeah, as a productivity ninja, I help people think about how they work, um, and how they approach work. So I've written 3 books, and the latest of that is Struggle: The Surprising Truth, Beauty, and Opportunity Hidden in Life's— I'm gonna say shifty moments, because I haven't actually asked you if I'm allowed to swear on your podcast.

You can. I did notice that in the title, you can. But nice, nice move there. Like that. That's great. And actually, Grace, maybe that's a good place to start. I mean, you're so well qualified in this topic, but Tell us about Struggle so that people understand the perspective.

Yeah, so Struggle as a book came about when people I'd worked with as a Productivity Ninja had come to me saying, "Okay, I've got my to-do list sorted, I've got my inbox sorted, you know, I've got all of that kind of stuff nailed, but I feel like I'm still struggling. Help." And because I'm a coach, what I tend to do is go, "Tell me more." And the more that I had these conversations, the more that we dug a little bit deeper, and the more I noticed that we tend to have this narrative narrative around struggle that is, it's the stuff that gets in the way. You know, it's an obstacle, it's a disruption, it's a door that's closed. And we just think, how do I get rid of it? How do I get over it? How do I get away from it? And yet what I noticed in my coaching conversations was the more that we sit with struggle, the more we dive deeper and get curious about it, maybe we've got it all wrong about getting it wrong. So maybe actually our struggle isn't just the thing that we need to get rid of. Maybe there's an opportunity here. Because actually a lot of our innovations come from our struggle, a lot of our growth, our learning. And in fact, if we're willing to get curious about it, we might find that it's where we do our best work.

I think this is great. I was so looking forward to this conversation because it was a bit of a wake-up for me, and it made me think of a few questions. And one of them for you, Grace, is when did you have this eureka moment where you realized that struggle had a bit of a good side?

That's a really good question. I don't know if I had it. It wasn't like a massive light bulb moment. Yeah, it was over the course of time, it was over having these conversations and, and just suddenly kind of going, you know what, often— and I think it's often because, yeah, when we talk about productivity and generally when we talk about sort of strategies for success, we, we always focus on how do I get there, you know, what's the ease, what's the efficiency, what's the, what's the most direct route. And I think it was just over the course of time having these conversations, I suddenly kind of, kind of thought I don't think we've got the full picture here. We see struggle as the opposite of being productive, and I don't think that's true.

Yeah, no, we're going to dig into that. And did something happen in your life that you want to share that made you think that way? A personal thing?

I mean, looking back, actually, a lot of the most pivotal moments in my, in my career, in my life, you know, have been as a result of struggle. So, for example, yeah, the fact that I specialise in productivity I resisted time management and productivity as my niche because I'm naturally disorganised. It's the thing that I struggle with.

I'm fascinated to hear you're naturally disorganised as a productivity ninja.

Exactly. You, like, you just wouldn't put the two together, would you? No. And I actually resisted that as a niche for a long, long time. And it got to the point where I just went, you know what, Grace, you keep getting asked this question, how do we do it, how do we fit it all in? So just answer the bloody question. Like, just start getting curious about the topic.. And the more that I did, the more I realized that the fact that I'm naturally disorganized gave me a different perspective. It gave me a different approach. So by getting curious about my struggle, I actually developed a niche that was about being refreshingly human. And people kind of read my books and went, have you been inside my head, Grace? And, you know, what I thought was actually my weakness turned out to be my strength.

Wow, that's fantastic. Oh, because I was going to ask you, can you give me an example? You've partly given me one there where, but you know, maybe through some of your coaching without divulging anything, can you give me an example where using this mindset, or is it a reframe? Would you call it a reframe of mindset? As you're an NLP person, I thought I'd throw that in.

You can call it a reframe, you could call it a mindset, you can call it an approach, call it whatever you like, really.

Any of those.

Any of those. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, Actually, you know, there are probably some stories that your listeners will probably be quite familiar with. So, stories of innovation. Have you heard about how the Post-it note was invented?

No, but I'm fascinated to hear.

Let's go for it. So, Spencer Silver at 3M, his job at the time was to develop a super strong adhesive for use in the aircraft construction industry. So it's the glue that holds the plane together. What he found instead was a weak adhesive. So, you know, it would stick, but it would unstick again. Now, you kind of want your plane to hold together, don't you? Absolutely. Yeah. It helps. So, you know, you could probably say he was having a bad day. I'll give you another example first before I kind of go back to it. But, you know, person number 2, there was somebody who was ironing, maybe getting ready for work, and accidentally rested their iron on a pen. Right. The ink shot out of the pen. Went all over the clothes, ruining the ironing board, making a huge mess everywhere. Safe to say both those people were having a pretty bad day. Yeah. Right? But what if the magic is right where the mess is? So Spencer's worst glue ever turned out to be, yeah, pretty useless for aircraft construction, but actually really useful for the stationery world. So that became how the Post-it note was started and how the Post-it note was invented. The ink that shot out of the pen actually became the inspiration for Canon's first inkjet printer. Really?

Yeah. That's brilliant.

And I think the key is that we hear these stories of innovation and in hindsight they look like genius, but I think it's worth remembering that in the moment they can feel a lot like frustration.

So if I was going through struggles, which everyone does, what is the— with that in mind, what's the thought process that someone needs to go through to have the right mindset or to leverage the thinking? Yeah.

So, so I think the key here isn't every cloud has a silver lining. So it's not to get very sort of glib or uber positive about it, because if we try and trick ourselves into thinking there's, there's good to be found in everything, when you're in the middle of that frustration, you're not in the right place to find that. It'll just be annoying. I don't know if you've ever had that, like where you're—

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah, you're struggling with someone else.

Some people are annoyed by me when I'm being positive when I shouldn't be as well. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Like you. So the first thing we kind of need to do is, is just face it, you know, acknowledge the struggle, acknowledge the hurt or the fear or whatever's going on. And you need to be able to say, ah, I wasn't expecting this, like, that hurts, or this is hard, and, and acknowledge that reality. That's the first thing. And, and so I call this either your oh shit moment, like, shit, this has gone wrong, and, and just allow yourself to be really honest about it with yourself. And in doing that, we're able to face it. Because what happens with struggle is our instinctive sort of response is, "I need to get away from this." And that's why we look either for the exit or we look to avoid it, or we look to fix it. Yeah, we look for that solution. But if we first just start with facing it, we can actually start to see it for what it is. Yeah. Step 2, I call it, what is this shit? Yeah. So, what are we actually dealing with here? Because there are so many different ways that our instinctive, fear-based brain can misinterpret something. So, imagine you get an email from someone, you know, maybe a colleague, maybe a client, that just comes across really shirty. You're like, what the heck? What's going on here?

I've had those.

Exactly, right? Your instinct, depending on where you're at at the time, you might be thinking, 'Have I done something wrong?' or 'What's wrong with them?' You know, and you kind of go to that, like, you're trying to assign wrong to something. You might be thinking they're really angry and you might react in a particular way. But what is this shift, or shit, here is basically going, 'What's really going on here?' It's where we activate curiosity instead of fear. And fear will basically tell you, 'Danger, go away.' So it kind of diverts your attention away from the thing, whereas curiosity will go, "That's interesting.

Let's take a closer look." So, you're trying to get to the truth. What is this thing?

Yeah. What is this thing? So, what does it look like? It looks like someone's attacking me, but what else could it also be? They're really angry. What does that mean? What do they care about? So, I often say if you encounter email rage, it's like road rage but with email, you know, whether that's in yourself or in someone else, We never— we don't tend to rage about stuff we don't care about, right? So what's the care underlying that rage? Okay.

Now what do I do? What do I do with this now? Okay.

So what you do with that is you start to get— you get curious. So you get curious about it. So if it's a difficult conversation, that curiosity will activate your empathy, and you'll start to notice different perspectives, different nuances, maybe different possibilities. You know, it might be, there's another way I can come back at this, or there's a, you know, oh, I wonder what, I wonder if, and I might have a conversation that's different to if I was just reacting. If it's an obstacle, it might be, okay, what's possible here that wasn't possible before? And our brains are lazy. You know, we're biased to the familiar. So, sometimes we have lots of good ideas, but we never do anything with them because the familiar is already working, even if it's not working very well. So sometimes it's not until that conventional route is shut that we become open to the unconventional. So it's like, okay, that didn't work. So what does that give me permission to do? You know, what else might be possible here? And that's where we start getting creative.

It did get me thinking though, because I was thinking, if it's kind of a trigger— I think you're saying it's a trigger of some sort, struggle is a trigger— can you fake it and create the same mindset without the struggle by finding a trigger of some sort. I don't know, maybe I'm looking too deep.

I mean, you know, you could do— I suppose you could create a thing for yourself. You could create that disruption, you create the innovation, the limitation. And I mean, you know, artists, you do that all the time, don't they? They kind of give themselves limitations and constraints and go, right, rather than having all of these possibilities, If we only had half the time or half the money, what would we do with that? You have, sometimes companies do things like pre-mortems. Yeah. What could go wrong here? Let's look at all the ways that this could go wrong. And also you can invite, I think sometimes, sometimes struggle exists without us knowing about it. So, if you are talking to a team about a new project, for example, or a change that's gonna happen, chances are there's gonna be varying emotions. Within that team, but you don't hear about it unless you ask about it. So, maybe it's, you know, what's, um, yeah, maybe it's encouraging people to talk about their fears and their feelings and what your niggles are. So, one of the things that we do at Think Productive is, um, we have a thing called Stinky Fish.

Right.

Okay. And, um, so Elena, who's the, um, MD at Think Productive, she, she started this and, and she basically, your Stinky Fish is the kind of thing that niggles at you, and if you leave it to fester, it just stinks more. And so by calling it a stinky fish, we— any one of us can say, I think I've got a stinky fish here. And it's like, I'm not sure it's at the point where it's a problem that I need someone to fix.

It's gonna be, yeah, nice.

But it's just— I'm just feeling a bit ugh about it, and, and I'm just gonna raise it. And sometimes all you need to do is just air it and it stops stinking and it's fine, it goes away. Other times it might be, oh, you know what, this is why it's stinking and we can do something about that. But calling it that makes it easier to air it and to speak up about it. So, I think, I mean, you can certainly try and engineer that kind of creative thinking without the struggle, but I think there's plenty of struggle that we can use.

There's plenty of stinks to deal with in front of you, right? Yeah, exactly. Gets you moving.

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At the beginning, you introduced yourself as a productivity ninja. I know that because I know you, but can you explain that? And then secondly, is there a link between productivity and struggle?

Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, basically what I help people with as a productivity ninja is I go, I speak at conferences, I write books, I, you know, run workshops, um, all around the sort of practicality of how do we get good work done. So, how do we do our best work, have fun doing it, and have a life outside of work? So, I do that through training workshops with Think Productive. I do that through my own books, and I do that through speaking as well. And the link between productivity and struggle, it almost feels like it's the opposite from the outset. It's like productivity is about how do we get good work done, struggle is about what gets in the way. But actually, if we think about what does good work look like, and increasingly for all of us, you know, good work isn't just about delivering our expertise and doing it efficiently. It's also about growth. It's about innovation. It's about navigating change. It's about going beyond our, what I call our zone of expertise, and into that kind of, that zone in the periphery, our learning zone, where we're not experts, when we're not going to be doing things efficiently, where actually it feels a lot like struggle. And so, you know, if productivity isn't just about churning out the same stuff over and over again, and I'd argue it's not, You know, how, what do we need to do in order to be able to do our best work? And sometimes waiting is the work. And you know, when we're used to being able to tick things off really quickly and we're stuck on something, we're gonna be thinking, you know, traditional productivity would be like, I'm not being productive. I'm not ticking that thing off. I'm not getting that dopamine hit. I'm not getting a million things done. This feels awkward. It feels messy. I'm wrangling with stuff. And if we're navigating that from a perspective of, "It's all gone wrong," then we're gonna wanna just get away from that. So we go, "Ooh, look, emails. I'll deal with emails. They're easy to tick off." Right? And yet—

We move to less exciting things.

Exactly. Less exciting things or easier things, things that we have more control over. And so, what we can get into, what we can find ourselves in, is a mindset where struggle just feels like, 'You know, it's the interruption. It's the thing getting in the way of my work.' But actually, what if this is the work? It might not be the work that you'd plan for, if it's a disruption. It might not be the work that you'd choose, if it's a really hard piece of work. But maybe there's good work to be done here. And it's all about paying attention.

Yeah, it's really interesting because I'm trying to link your— what your comments and your background, and then someone asked me a question yesterday, which I'm going to link together. So you call yourself on your website A recovering perfectionist.

Tell me more about that.

I'm trying to connect it to this because there's a dichotomy between being productive, being a perfectionist, dealing with struggles, adding struggles. What— tell me more about that.

Well, yeah, I mean, a mantra that I had, I actually stole from a friend of mine when my kids were little, and she was talking about being, you know, a sort of mantra as a parent was to be a good enough parent most of the time 'with intermittent lapses into hopelessness and brilliance.' And so that's my anti-perfection mantra that I've sort of adopted. And, you know, I grew up as a perfectionist. I was a straight-A student. I was very good at people-pleasing, figuring out what people wanted from me and delivering it, you know. And that served me fine at school, but obviously you're gonna get into— you're gonna get into problems with that later on in life, and I did. And so for me, Being a recovering perfectionist means recognizing when good enough is good enough, recognizing when perfectionism is stopping me from starting, or when it's getting me to play small because I don't want to take that risk where I might get things wrong. And yeah, it's absolutely related to struggle because it's about recognizing that there is, there is learning and growth, but also sometimes there is just beauty in doing something imperfectly.

Yeah.

Yeah. One of the stories I talk about in Struggle comes from a team leader who was very much the sort of person who would always hold the whole team together. Yeah. She was the person who would hold everyone together. And when COVID hit, it was just felt like there was one thing after another that went wrong with the team. But what she found in that sort of sense of like, I couldn't hold everything together. I wasn't the perfect person, was actually the team grew stronger together. Through all of those struggles, through the imperfection, through the, I can't deal with it all myself, I can't do it all myself, I have to ask for help, the team actually grew together and that was a really beautiful thing. And another thing I talk about in Struggle is how we often have this myth of success as like being almost the lone hero, you know, single-handed success kind of thing. It's like, I've done it all. And actually, yeah, I think that the reality is that we're stronger together. What makes me weak makes us strong. Because if I'm stuck on something and I need to ask for help, that gives an opportunity for a friend or a team member or a colleague or a family member to step in and to do their bit. And actually, that's what creates those connections and those bonds. That's what makes our team stronger. And that's what makes our organisation stronger.

This is great. So, let's give some practical tips then. It would be great to give some top tips to deal with serious struggle for people that are listening.

Well, Gary, give me some examples of struggles.

Okay, I mean, this will give you a couple of examples. One might be, you know, a company is trying to grow their business and they're really struggling with it. There's lots of priorities, but they can't— they've prioritized the priorities, but they still need to grow. Like, what do I do? How do I make the boat go faster? And, you know, deal with that kind of struggle, but, you know, carrying the workload and trying to be successful.

Yeah, I think When we're talking teams and companies, I think one of the big things you could do is grow a culture where it's okay to talk about your struggles. You encourage that conversation. And so, it might be, you know, it might be that you shared a book with them, um, you know, or you start a conversation with them that, that's around like, okay, what's our oh shit moment? What's going on here? Let's give ourselves permission to speak out our fears or our frustrations., and create a space where that's all you're doing. You're not like trying to come up with the answer or trying to fix things too quickly. You're just, you know, giving space to acknowledging that. And then you switch it from fear to curiosity. So you can name your fears. First of all, it's much easier to switch away from fear when you know what your fear is. So name the fears and create that space where you can do that. And then go, okay, Let's dial in the curiosity. So let's get curious about this. If fear is telling me this is a problem, what if it's not? What's good about this? What could be good about this? Yeah. What if, um, what if this gave us permission to do something completely new? What would that look like? And again, you're giving, you're creating that space where people can come up with half-formed ideas. They can come up with silly ideas. They can go, this is ridiculous, but like, this is what it's making me think of. Yeah. And again, you're not looking for the answer straight away. You're not looking for perfection. You're just looking for, you know, ideas. You're looking to get creative. And then through that creativity, you can then see, okay, what, what have we got here? What, where do we want to pursue? You know, what do we want to like explore more? So getting those kind of conversations started is a really good idea. The other one is getting used to the, the words I don't know.

Right, not an obvious one, is it?

No, not obvious. So you and I are both in a business where, you know, people come to us because, you know, we have a level of expertise. So they come to us because we know what we're doing and we can tell them. Apparently. Apparently, yeah. So there's a lot that we, we tend to associate with knowing, like competence, confidence, expertise, professionalism, leadership. But if we're navigating new territory and particularly if we're navigating unknown, like uncharted territory, then if you know everything, you are not growing. Yeah. You're staying with what you know. You're not going, you going beyond the edge. And so, if people don't know, and, and to say the words, I don't know, can feel really uncomfortable if you're used to knowing, if you're used to having the answers. And so, what can happen is people end up kind of either holding back So, "I'm only going to speak on things I know. I'm not going to go there if I don't know." Or they make things up. It's like, you know, they double down on certainty and go, "Well, I have all the answers already." I see that a lot. Yeah, we see that a lot at the moment, you know, in the wider world. And what happens then is that we don't listen. We don't— we're not willing to explore. We're not willing to change our minds and learn. And so, neither of those are helpful. So, getting really comfortable with "I don't know," Celebrating when somebody goes, "Actually, I don't know." It's like, "Great." That means, yeah, we're here to find out.

We're here together.

Yeah, we're here together.

You said at the beginning, Grace, sort of just trying to join the dots a bit, that sometimes people are irritated if they've got something that's overwhelming and we not belittle it, but we just sort of say, "Get over yourself." Are there some— and you talk a bit in the book about exploring emotional and psychological aspects of struggle. What are some practical strategies for someone trying to manage being a bit overwhelmed?

Yeah. So, you know, I said earlier, like, we had those kind of two shits, like, oh shit, and then what is this shit? The, the oh shit part is about being present with, with that, whatever that emotion is. And so sometimes it's an acknowledgement thing. Sometimes it's a conversation thing. Sometimes it's just like allowing yourself to kind of be really present in your body. So I notice that if, for example, if I'm in an argument, particularly with my husband, I will talk really fast. It's almost like my brain is on double time. I'm coming up with ideas, I know what I want to say next. I'm probably not listening. Yeah, it's like, "Tut tut tut tut tut." It happens so quickly. And so, one of the things I need to do in that situation, if I want to engage my curious brain and not my fear-based brain, is I need to slow my brain down. And the most ridiculous thing, but it works really well for me, is something that I discovered once very randomly in a yoga class. And it's where she got me to balance on one leg. And yeah, and so you're trying to balance on one leg, you've got to find a point where you focus on to try and balance. And we did this for what felt like ages. It was probably like 30 seconds. And then she said, and what were you thinking about at the time? Absolutely nothing. Focused. I was so focused. Yeah. And so occasionally if I'm having an argument with my husband and I realise I need to slow down, you might find me standing on one leg. Okay.

Interesting to know.

Because it just, it, it's a thing that helps me to go, okay, slow down, slow down, be present, listen. And so, you know, things that help you to sort of embody that slowness and to embody that pause. So for some people it might be, someone else said the other day that the, a little mindfulness trick is to you rub your fingers together and like really try and feel the ridges of your fingertips. So if you know that you need to slow yourself down and be in that moment, just doing that can help you to go, okay, yeah, I'm noticing that. Um, and, and you, because you're actively engaging that part of your brain that is about paying attention to the details rather than running away with kind of disaster thinking or whatever.

It probably explains why people bump into me looking at their mobile phones because they're not concentrating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So paying attention, that sort of thing. But the other thing, I suppose that's like an in-the-moment tip, but a wider tip, I think, and this also links back to productivity as well, is not underestimating the power of rest and pause. Yeah. So, we often think about how fast we can do something and then it's always like, what's next? What's next? What's next? And we kind of see, we often see rest as like a sign of weakness. It's like, oh, okay. I do need to rest now. But actually, if you see rest as the thing that fuels you and the thing that helps your recovery, like, that's the pause. So, if you listen to a piece of music and there's no pause, it's horrendous. There's nothing good about it. If you go into an art gallery and it's just pieces of art all next to each other and there's no white space, it's just a mess.

Yeah, such a good point. Never thought about it, but yeah, I get it.

So, your pause is— yeah, your pauses are where you start to process things. It's where you start to find that, that perspective or that distance or, or that idea that comes. So, you know, if you're thinking, I haven't got time, I need to come up with, um— so I talked about the two shits. The third shit is holy shit, you know, and that's your revelation. Yeah, that's like the, the innovation that comes, the opportunity, the stronger relationship. Yeah, it's the truth, the beauty, the opportunity all coming together on this point. Coming together, exactly. And And, you know, if you're anything like me and you're impatient, you want to jump straight from "oh shit" to "holy shit," right? It's like, how do I find the resolution? Yeah. But when you do that, you just— it's too quick. So, you know, what we'll end up doing is default to either "I just need to make something happen," and we create— we couldn't— I call it our toilet roll moment. So, you know, the moment in the pandemic where everyone went out and stopped buying toilet paper?

Yeah, absolutely.

I remember. We felt out of control, so we were like, what can I control? What can I gravitate to? I'm just gonna go buy toilet paper and make myself feel better. And so that's what happens if you jump too quickly to what's the solution. So you need to give, you need to buy yourself time and give yourself space to be able to, you know, stand down that fear, get into that curiosity, and then see what happens. So allow that stuff to bubble, to brew, allow it to happen. On an individual basis, it's giving yourself that downtime, allowing yourself those pauses. But on an organisational or a team basis, it's having what I call campfire conversations. So, you imagine, imagine you're on a journey. You can't do it all in one day. You've got to stop. You've got to pitch your tent. You have your campfire conversations. You haven't reached your destination yet, but you're going to regroup. And, you know, even just that idea of a campfire, we light a campfire when we're not being chased by the bear. Or the Tiger, right? You know, and we kind of, that's where we regroup, it's where we chat, it's where we process what's happened, it's where we think about what's coming next. And again, that's really important in our team lives, in our organisation lives.

Great analogy. So listen, I've got a couple of questions to ask you before we get to your musical tastes. But this is really, this is really great and very inspirational for me. So, think about yourself, if you could go back in your, in a little time machine, Knowing what you know now, and you know a lot, and using the skills you've learned, what would you do differently as a result?

Can I tell another story?

You can tell a quick story, absolutely.

So there is, there's a story in the book, in Struggle, that I talk about which came from a conversation I had with my husband in a marriage counsellor's office where we were recounting an argument and the marriage counsellor turned around to my husband and said, that sounds a lot like panic. 'And I was like, no, he's calculated, he's argumentative, that's not panic. And, and he turned around and said, yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. And that blew my mind. Now it blew my mind because if someone's arguing with me, my instinct is to defend myself, to justify, to, to argue back, or even just to go, hey, no, no, no, what, what, you know, we're not on two different sides, let me explain myself, you know, let me find a way of of kind of, yeah, we can come together on this. But if someone's panicking, you don't talk them out of a panic attack. You don't argue your way out of a panic attack. And so, you know, what, what helps my husband to stand down from a panic attack, for him it was like physical touch. It's like hand on your shoulder or hug or like, hey, you're safe with me. And, you know, for me, that was one of the key things that helped me to start to recognize fear in what I call high-functioning fear. It doesn't look like fear, but that's what's going on. And if you can start to recognize high-functioning fear in the conversations that you're having, or just even in yourself, you can start to go, whoa, okay, you know, I don't need to go run away from this bear. I don't need to argue my way out of here. If I can recognize the fear in that person, I can tend to that fear and I can tend to their safety. And then we can see if there's something we need to argue about or fix or whatever.

What a great bit of advice. That's fantastic. And what a good reflection. Not an easy one.

No.

Fantastic. Well, I did have one more quick— I'm going to throw one more in because I'm really keen to know this. If you could only give 3 bits of advice for someone to leverage struggle, what would they be?

Oh.

Only 3.

Only 3. Only 3. Okay. Irritants are catalysts. So, if you're in chemistry, a catalyst is essentially an irritant. So, next time you find yourself irritated, just tell yourself irritants are catalysts. What is this a catalyst for? Asking for help is a sign of strength. That's the second one. And the third one is the end of the world as we know it is the beginning of everything else.

Wow.

What a great way to finish. You nailed it, Grace. Thank you so much. So I tell you what, really inspirational, very insightful. I'm going to get to your music taste, but thanks for coming on. It's been so interesting and really great spending time together. So this is the moment where we have a— we create a playlist with all our guests of their— of music either inspires them or just something that's interesting to them or their family, and we'll add it to the playlist. So having not given you much notice, what are one or two tracks? Like, no notice. What are the one or two tracks?

And you've given And you've been occupying my brain ever since you told me that you were going to ask me that question, so I've had no chance to think about it.

Very mean of me.

It is very mean. Oh, what if I can't? Okay, so I'm going to go Four Non-Blondes with "What's up?" because that's actually one of the chapters in the book. It was one of the links to the book. It was like, you know, when you stop and you go, "Hey, what's up?" Yeah, that was a little earworm that was in my head when I wrote the book. That's a great one. Yeah. And the other one is one that just always makes me smile, which is "You've Got the Music in You" by New Radicals.

Yeah. That's very good. I thought you were going to sing it for me there, Grace, for a second. That's great. Thank you so much.

Thanks for coming on. "You Get What You Give" is the title. Yeah.

"You Get What You Give." Yeah.

Okay. That's it.

We'll add that to the playlist. Thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll see you again very soon.

I had lots of fun. Thanks for the conversation.

Yeah, it was really good fun.

Thanks for listening and a big thanks to Grace Marshall for joining us for that fascinating exploration into the psychology of the struggle and sharing her insights and experience on the topic. A reminder that you can download a free chapter of Grace's latest book and find out more about Grace over at gracemarshall.com. And for all things Company Doctor, including previous episodes, show notes, and more, visit thecompanydoctor.com. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.