46: What's Your Pivot Profile? Unpacking Pivotability with Dr. Tom Guarriello

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot the only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello, everybody. Jenny Blake here, author of Pivot the only move that matters is your next one. Talking with my good friend and collaborator, Dr. Tom Guariello.

Hi, Jenny.

Hi, Tom. Tom is the founder of Robo Psych, the Psychology of Human Robot Interaction, an awesome newsletter and podcast. And we're doing a joint show today talking about our latest collaboration, the Pivotability Index.

Pretty exciting.

Yes. This is a very straightforward, less than 5 minute, 38 question self assessment to determine your pivot IQ, how pivotable you are given our rapidly changing economy.

Yes, yes. It was one of those things that we started to talk about, and the more we talked about it, the more fun it sounded like it would be, and also the more value we thought it would have for people to quickly get a snapshot of their overall mindset for approaching change. And we tested a bunch of questions and came up with what we think is the beginning of a pretty decent questionnaire.

Yes, we realized there was so much overlap between our work because the psychology of human robot interaction and Tom and I have both done shows together about a year ago for each other's podcasts, but that how we interact with robots, AI and technology is becoming increasingly important. And those skills, as Tom might call it, robot whispering or AI whispering, are increasingly relevant in the job market that we find ourselves in.

Yeah. The idea that we are going to be faced with, if we aren't already, dramatic changes in the vocational and even broader in the life landscape, and that those changes will be driven by a bunch of factors of which robots and AI will certainly be a significant one.

Our Pivotability assessment has three outcomes. Security Seeker, Measured, Pivoter, and Pivot Pro. Tom, I'm going to throw it to you first. What does it mean to be a Pivot pro? What does high pivotability look like?

Well, high pivot pivotability is a way of characterizing a set of personality traits, emotional reactions, and behaviors. We started by thinking about research that has been done in psychology, particularly around personality traits. We know that.

Ever since the early Greeks, we've been trying to figure out the answer to some pretty fundamental questions. Who am I? Why do I do what I do? Are kind of two fundamental questions that has taken a lot of time.

Over the millennia. And since psychology developed as a, as we call it, a science and a profession, as an actual discipline of its own, the idea of a personality and what the characteristics are of an individual's personality has taken up a lot of our research. We all know, you know, names Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and Alfred Adler and Carl Rogers. All of these people wrote personality theories. And as you might imagine, there's been a lot of conflict over which of these personality theories is the right one, the best one. Well, about now, maybe almost 40 years ago, psychological research started to focus in on some traits that looked like they described personality pretty comprehensively. And that approach came to be called the big five, the big five theory of personality. And you know, very briefly, those five personality traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and. And the unfortunately named neuroticism, which I like to call negative emotionality because I think it's a better descriptor of that personality trait. So those five personality traits, the big five, have been looked at as ways to characterize any individual. So, for example, if you take openness to experience, we can go all the way from being very, very closed to new experiences and wanting to stick with the tried and true, all the way to open for any new thing. Always looking for a new restaurant, always want to try a new movie. You know, the people who are very, very eager to explore and to experiment with new things. Same with conscientiousness. People who. It's not hard to tell who the conscientious people are in our lives. They're on time, they do what they say they're going to do. You go into their homes and they're pretty well organized.

I wonder if conscientiousness correlates to neuroticism. I think when you start, certainly have both.

When you start to look at some of the correlations, as you could imagine hundreds of studies have done, you do see some correlations between some of them. Agreeableness. So anyway, when we talk about pivotability and the pivot iq, we're talking about whether or not we as individuals are open to opportunities. So we would look for a high openness to experience as being one of the most important characteristics of someone who is likely to be a pivot pro.

Yes. And by the way, ocean and canoe, those are two acronyms that I learned that you can use to remember the big five. Yes, A lot of this came up too. While I was researching the book that I kept asking myself the question, what makes someone really effective at pivoting? And by the way, when we wrote this self assessment, we also didn't want to reward totally quitting something the first second. It gets hard. We looked at a certain amount of stick to it iveness as well. So it's not just that, oh, someone's willing to change constantly at all times, no matter what.

That's for sure. Conscientiousness is an important part of.

Success, and so being able to see things through and meet commitments is an important part of being an effective pivoter.

And part of the reason, because why create the pivotability assessment at all if there are these big five personality traits? But we even incorporated things like someone's financial situation, which didn't make all the survey takers thrilled, you know, because some of those questions are sensitive. But we can't deny the reality that if someone's the primary breadwinner, for example, of a large family, that's a very different pivot starting point than it will be for someone who's totally independent, free as a bird, or someone who's independently wealthy and for whom money is just not an issue.

And this is why I like to think about the N in ocean or canoe as negative emotionality rather than neuroticism. Fear is a negative emotion, and being fearful about one's financial situation is a factor in many decisions, certainly a decision about whether or not it's time to pivot from a situation that might be secure but unfulfilling. So, yes, we certainly did want to try to capture the balance that's necessary to help, to give people guidance around sticking with things and yet not staying with a situation that's unfulfilling in the long run.

Absolutely. And part of this, too, was that no one question summarizes the whole. So for some people, they feel like, well, money's not a factor in my career decisions. I am willing, and I write about this in the book, too, I am willing to take a pay cut. I am willing to have some financial risk because I'm not willing to stay in the same place if it's no longer a fit. And so one thing, Tom, that I know is really important to you is separating out the mindset or approach from the method. Say more about that.

You know, at the end of the day, there are lots of different ways that we can try to accomplish goals, and those are methods. You know, I can. If my goal is to lose weight, there are many methods that are in place to help me to lose weight. But none of those methods are going to work unless and until I have adopted a mindset towards my weight and towards my body that will sustain me through the application of any method. So in regard to pivoting, in regard to developing what I call robo psychology, the underlying methodology, I mean the underlying approach is more important than the specific methodology that we use. Even though in pivot you've outlined a very effective methodology for pivoting, but without the mindset change that takes place beforehand, I have a feeling those particular methods aren't going to be too effective.

That's so true. And even though it the pivot iq, the assessment we've created, it doesn't test whether someone knows the pivot method, which is a four stage process that I describe in the book, it doesn't address that whatsoever. In fact, we wanted to create something that would help people understand their pivot mindset, that they could see where they fall. And even the people who landed in the middle measured pivoter, where they're more thoughtful, they take more time to make a move. For a lot of them, when they got the results, they said, yes, absolutely, that's me. I weigh my options for a long time. I really think through things. The people who got Pivot Pro, it seemed to resonate security seeker. So as with many self assessments, we're not really surprising people. We're just helping put language around their mindset and then some suggested next steps and experiments that people can take. And then as you said, then there's a method to back it up. But that the mindset piece is. And that's what was important to me about creating this. And I know for you with your podcast and what you're doing with Robo Psych, the mindset is really the muscle that's getting stretched right now that seeing how frequently people are are pivoting by choice and by circumstance. I cannot stress that enough that we're all being asked to uplevel our mindset around this.

Yeah, this is one of the hardest things for any of us to do, is to take a step back from the world that we experience and understand that we are a part of making that world what it is as it appears to us. We all think the world is just there given to us as if we were watching a movie that someone else had shot. The fact of the matter is we create the world along with the world. So we sort of say, well, you know, how you look at things really matters. Well, we have to take that very seriously.

That's a wild thing when you really stop and think about it.

Absolutely.

We're all starring in the movie of our own lives and creating and of our own creation. Exactly.

And yet we believe that, oh, well, you know, things are just out there in the world, and I'm here and I'm just, like, recording it. Like I'm a vcr. No, I am creating. I'm creating situations all the time, co creating them, if you will, with the people that I interact with and the places I put myself in order to experience opportunities. And none of that is immediately visible to us. What's immediately visible to us is the world. Oh, it's just the world. But when I stop and think about it, you know, I really do look at things in a cautious manner much of the time. I didn't realize until I took this very brief little survey just how much that's affecting my will. Willingness to explore opportunities. That's pretty much what we were trying to do, was to just begin to hold a mirror up for people to their own mindset and their own approach when it comes to thinking about the next.

Absolutely. And part of it is that pivoting is a skill. It's a mindset, and it's a skill, and it's one that we can get better at. So I know there is some controversy around even things like the big five that were born with a certain set point, how much room is there really for variability and evolution? But when it comes to pivoting and this mindset and this approach that we can evolve, we can change how we see. And I'll try and find it to link in the show notes. There was this great study that was done on therapeutic intervention and journaling and resilience. And it was that when asked to think of themselves as a character in a movie and do some journaling on that, it actually helps people process challenging situations. So one of my favorite questions for someone at a pivot point is, why is this happening to your character at this exact moment, at this exact time, and you're the protagonist if you're starring in this movie of your life and you're the hero and we're all watching you and we're rooting you on, and then, boom, the character hits a pivot point. Why you? Why now? And why in this way? And that when people can reflect in that manner? Someone, in fact, one of the pivot coaches that I trained, her name is Melanie. She had this great line, which is, instead of asking, why is this happening to me? Why is this happening for me? And that that shift alone is an example of a shift in mindset from one tiny word.

This is also an important psychological.

Theory that we used in our discussion of the pivot index. And that is this idea of where does the control of my life live? How much am I in. Am I in control of my life? And how much are circumstances in control of my life? And many years ago, a psychologist named Julian Rotter took this idea and created a model called internal or external locus of control. And what we find is that people who have a high level of external locus of control, who believe that what happens to them is essentially a matter of fate and luck and that very little of what they do will affect the outcomes of their lives, tend to live according to that belief system. And so they don't do as many things that put them in position to be successful as people do who have a high internal locus of control.

That's very similar, too, to what Carol Dweck has now in more recent years called the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. The people who believe they can achieve success by working hard and that character. These things are not fixed traits. Success is not a fixed trait, or even IQ tend to be much more successful and resilient than those who have a fixed mindset that I'm just born with a certain level of intelligence, or pivotability, if you will, and that's that.

This is an ongoing question in psychology research. As you could imagine, there are. We're always trying to determine, especially now that.

We are becoming more technically proficient at neuroscience and being able to look at the correlates of areas of the brain with certain kinds of behaviors and certain kinds of reactions and saying, well, gee, you know, this level. For example, take negative emotionality. There are studies that will tell you that people who are volatile in their negative reactions have been volatile in their negative reactions for most of their lives, and that this is a trait that has a high level of inheritability. Others will, will, will say, as, for example, does extroversion. That's another one that we find to have a very strong.

Genetic and lifelong persistence kind of track record. Openness to experience, on the other hand, is one that seems to be more amenable to circumstantial intervention. So we can teach people, for example, oh, come on, try the new restaurant. Let's just once try the new restaurant.

Or try the new technology, because you've said openness is one of the key traits, even when the robocyc field.

Well, certainly it's a key. It's absolutely determinative to whether or not someone is going to pick up this new piece of technology and tinker with it, or whether they're going to say, oh no, I can't do that kind of thing. So right there, we've already started down a path of high robocyc of a high robocyc kind of competency or a lower competency based on that very singular trait of openness experience.

Speaking of which, it's a little too early for us to tell from our data in terms of the pivotability index, but is there a killer app to pivotability? Let's both pontificate on this. So I'll let you go first.

Well, I do think openness is probably the determinative characteristic. If one is low on openness to experience, it's going to be hard to. The word that comes to mind is convince. It's as if people who are low on openness to experience need to be convinced to try something, whereas people who are high on openness to experience naturally gravitate towards trying new things. So right there, I think for me, openness to experience is the first step towards improving pivotability and it seems to be one that will benefit from practice.

I love it. I'll throw out a bundle of three, just the ones that we haven't talked about yet. Because when it comes to career, I also believe that expertise, reputation and platform play a huge role in how pivotal what someone's options are when they hit a pivot point. So being good at something, having a unique skill set, or better yet, a combination of unique skills, reputation, you're good at this thing and people know it. And platform is that, as I call it, you're discoverable. Just like Bluetooth devices, people know you're out there and what to find you for. And that the people that I've seen who have this expertise, reputation and platform opportunities come to them. They are so pivotable because before they're even looking, recruiters are poaching them for new opportunities or clients are knocking down their door. They have a wait list. So in career, those things are actually the more. And that's something that we can all invest in almost regardless of what the outer response is right away. Those are things we can continue to contribute to in our own career.

And I think there's a high correlation between those things and agreeableness. You know, we know that what we commonly call likability is a very important characteristic in lots and lots of domains. We know for celebrity, for politicians, for anyone in the public Eye likability becomes a determining factor. Agreeableness is a very strong characteristic of likability. And so people who put themselves so.

Much so that our presidential elections seem to be entirely based, I think, I.

Think we have now distilled everything down into whether or not. And now we have two candidates that have the highest unlikability of any two candidates in the history of presidential.

And it's crazy that pun intended. This trumps all else, all else in their record, or lack of record that goes so far into this likability question.

And so what it tells us is that these two individuals have overcome some pretty significant.

Odds, if you will, to become presidential candidates, when in fact they are not highly likable, unlike Barack Obama, who had very, certainly had.

Even Bill Clinton was adored by those.

Who loved him strongly liked very strong likability. Even among people who disagreed with him, he had strong likability. So I, so I think when we're talking about, about a pivot iq, if we're talking about someone who is.

Disagreeable, someone who's, whose natural presentation style is grumpy.

Grumpy is not going to get you very far, even if you're not trying to pivot, even if you're just trying to, to get along in the world. So that agreeableness. Now, unfortunately, agreeableness can be one of those characteristics that can be very difficult to change. People have temperaments that sometimes make them negative and disagreeable. And it takes very hard, focused work in order to overcome that. So I think this is a real challenge for people who have to now present themselves to new people in ways that are going to get those people to see what they can contribute.

Yes, I know. I cringe to even say that network and networking are contributors to pivotability, but they are. And in the movie of all of our lives, it's people are picking the characters that they want in their movie. And so like you said, if someone has a.

Crunchy or grumpy disposition, it's a little trickier. And in some cases, you know, we all have maybe the lovable grouch, but they're like really good at something. So maybe there are ways people can bring other things to the table. What else do you think gets in the way of pivotability?

Well, I think the negative emotionality is going to be a very significant barrier to being pivotal. Negative emotionality simply means that when things don't go well, how strongly and how.

Frequently is your emotional reaction? Negative anger.

Withdrawal, that pouting kind of response, Things are not going to go right for any of us, all of the time. The negative emotionality trait is the one that says, how are you going to respond? It doesn't mean that every time you get a flat tire, you step out of your car and go, oh, wow, isn't this fantastic? This is so beautiful.

Thank you, Ruby of my life, for this wonderful plot point.

I was hoping to be able to refresh my jack skills today. Jack up, Michael. No. What it does mean, however, is that a flat tire cannot just ruin an individual's moment. It can ruin an individual's day. They're weak. People who are high in negative emotionality will take the experience of a flat tire, go home, and as the unfortunate cliche story goes, kick the dog, yell at the wife, and yell at the kids and slam the doors. And that will be an example of very high negative emotionality.

I think living in a big city or a place like New York trains us out of you a little bit. I've had the craziest stuff happen. People shove me, trip me, grab my hands. I've seen the craziest stuff. And if I were to let each of those things, or when I lived in la, traffic, you know, any of these things that are just part of the day, let them ruin the whole day, you're screwed. But I will say that I. Part of the reason I wrote Pivot was that I did not feel very resilient when I was at my last going through my last big wave of change. And every day I was so sad and I felt so rocked. I had such reactions to this uncertainty. And now on the other side, you know, I did everything. I did all the things. I joke. It's like I made gratitude. Listen, I meditated, I did yoga, I went for walks, I exercised, I did everything they say to do. And I still had this deep, unshakable sadness and confusion. And I'm not sure what I could have done. But part of the reason that I felt so passionate about doing this research and writing this book is to help people work their way out of it. But. But more so than anything, the reason it's called a pivot and not the only words we had previously, midlife crisis, quarter, life crisis, was because it's not something to take personally. And I. My. That can help people change their perspective in this kind of. On this fifth behavior trait that you're talking about, at least. At least recognize you don't have to take your pivot personally. You're not crazy, you're not doing anything wrong. This is the new reality that we live In.

Yes. And I mean, that's such an important.

Reminder that this is the way the world works. Now, why is it happening to me? Well, it is happening to you, and it is happening everywhere, not necessarily to everyone at the same time, but we are all in this tornado of change at the moment, and taking it personally and being defeated by the things that don't go according to plan is one of those mindset features that guarantees that you're not going to succeed. We must learn this word resilience. You know, it's sort of like we throw it around, but we must learn that our resources are all we have to bring to bear on any situation. And if we don't bring them to bear because we're pouting or because we're sad because it didn't work out the way we wanted it to, it's not going to.

Yes. And here is Nassim Taleb's concept of beyond resilience to antifragility, which is not just that you make it through something, but actually that we emerge stronger that a certain amount. And I say certain because even he caveats and says to a point of chaos, uncertainty, disorder, but that actually antifragile organisms grow stronger when faced with these things. And so can we start to see risk and uncertainty and change as tools to strengthen us? And herein comes back the growth, mindset and the openness and the. The welcoming. Because here, one of my favorite Zen parables, and I'll put this in the show notes too, is called We'll See that. It's a story of a farmer. And for at every turn, someone says, oh, what wonderful news. You know, your. Your son didn't get drafted. And he says, we'll see. And then the next thing, his son breaks his leg, falls off a horse. Oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry. We'll see. And the story proceeds and had every turn. It's just, just, we'll see. And can we see our pivots this way that we don't know when something rocks us and we feel knocked down? But we'll see. This could be the best thing. And so often so many people I talk to who get pivoted look back and say, that's exactly what I needed. I wanted to make that change, and I just didn't have the courage to do it.

You know, people who don't.

Have the kind of mindset that we're talking about all say things like, and this is a gross generalization, but all say things like, oh, yeah, that's fine. It all worked out for them, but it's not, I don't know how it's going to work out for me. To me, one of the reasons that we are drawn to biography is that we see, we get to see the arc of a whole life. We don't see the minute by minute, day to day fluctuations in their vividness of the moment, but we get to see that that was a terrible moment for Winston Churchill. But had it not been for that terrible moment in Churchill's life, he never would have been able to speak with the resolve that it took to lead England at its darkest moment.

Those are the things that I hope give us courage in the face of those day to day fluctuations, because that's what it takes. It takes courage to be able to come to terms with robots taking over your job, for example. This is not for the faint of heart. This requires us to be courageous and to be called to do something with the assets that we've been given.

Absolutely. And to make a new map forward and to be willing to do that over and over again. I think that's part of the courage here too, is to say, yes, I'll game plan for the next few years, but beyond that I don't know right now and I won't know. One of the people I quote in the book, John Hill, said when he was graduating college, he knew he wanted to go into technology and he said, what I want to do doesn't exist yet. Yet. And that's becoming increasingly true for more of us beyond just those who are in the fields of IT and robotics.

Yeah.

And again, the openness to experience dimension is going to shape our reaction to that reality. So if the fact that what I'm going to do doesn't exist yet is the most frightening thing you've ever heard.

Yes.

Then your.

Your actions that put you into a position to be successful and have that new thing actually come about, they are not going to be strong. But if you are of a mindset that says, I know things are always going to be strong, disrupted, I know there's a new something that's going to happen for me come the future, then your chances of actually bringing that about are much greater.

And in practical terms, here's to go back to a Taleb concept, optionality. Okay. If we don't know what the future looks like, if what I want to do doesn't exist yet, and that's true for more of us, optionality says, how can you and I talk about this in pivot? The third stage is called pilot, which is all about small experiments, 10, 20% projects, as we used to call them at Google, to give yourself options. For a long time in the solopreneur space or entrepreneur space, it was all about multiple streams of income. Well, whether you're self employed or not, thinking about multiple streams of projects, multiple streams of experiments, multiple streams of new skills that instead of putting all our eggs in one basket and keeping them there forever, or falling under the illusion that we can even do that, that we're diversifying a little bit, and our career portfolio now is a series of experiments. And another way I think about those is like racehorses at the starting gate of the Kentucky Derby. We don't always know which new skill or experience or project is going to pull ahead, but if you start a few of them, usually one will in terms of energy or feedback or response from the marketplace.

It's so interesting how some of these.

Ancient virtues, you know, like courage and, you know, summary kind of statements, stoicism.

Like kind of not attaching, Buddhism, not attaching to external desires, faith, confidence, these.

Are, you know, these are, you know, they sound like cliches and yet they've become cliches because they are powerful truths. Having the confidence to say, I don't know what I'm going to be doing five years from now, but I have faith in my ability to navigate from here to there one day at a time, one step at a time, to be able to learn how to interact effectively with robots, how to interact with new people that I haven't met before. That's an ancient value, but it's certainly still very important.

And I want to highlight what you just said, because everyone has a different relationship to faith in terms of spirituality and faith in a higher purpose. Not everyone has that. However, what you said is in addition to that, which is I have faith in myself. And that part of this pivotability index in the book and what you're doing, Tom, it's about helping us all build that muscle of faith in ourself to figure things out. And it's not even faith in myself that I know everything, always. No, no. I just have faith in myself as a resourceful, creative person who can troubleshoot and figure things out, whether it's learning a new technology or pivoting your career in some massive way.

We talked about this the last time we were on a podcast together, Jenny. And that was when this idea that I've been thinking about for many years that I call point to point navigation, which is simply, you know, instead of trying to envision the entire arc of the journey, you know, from to the South Pole. I'm going to start by leaving New York and going to Miami. That's step one. That's one point. Now I have another point. I'm going to go from Miami, I'm going to go to Tierra del Fuego, whatever. And if you think about taking a trip, I often think about traveling as a sequence of events that have to occur. I have to get to the airport, I have to get to my gate, I have to get my board, I have to get to the gate, I have to find my. Every one of those steps is an accomplishment. I don't know whether or not the flight is going to take off on time. I don't know what it's going to be like when I get to the other end of the trip. What I do know though is as long as I accomplish every step along the way, I'm progressing towards my destination.

We're very simpatico on this front because that's why the subtitle of the book is the only move that matters is your next one. As in absolutely, don't even worry. Sometimes people know what they want. Two moves that out and then I call that the leapfrog approach. And you can then do an intermediary pivot. But essentially you just make then one next move and then decisions are data. You'll have a new vantage point exactly as you're describing. And then in the travel example, I call these travel pilots, when I'm going to take a kind of a nerve wracking trip like go across the world to work for two months by myself, that actually the one next move that makes the whole thing happen is booking the floor. That's the thing that takes the courage, that's the nerve wracking thing. And to put a stake in the ground and say I'm doing this, but once I've done that, the rest falls into place and the courage follows.

And this also I think speaks to one important factor in any kind of project commitment and that is momentum when we start to do something. When I started to.

Look at the research in human robot interaction, which I was not an expert in, and it's a whole body of psychological literature and I was not an expert in this literature, but I was fascinated by it because I had done my doctoral dissertation on the way people perceive other people, and I teach this class where I talk about our relationships with objects and I thought, well, you know, people, objects, robots. Robots are objects that are people. Like, huh, that's interesting. And look what's happening. And the next thing I knew, I was dipping my toe into the human robot interaction literature. And the more I read of it, the more opportunity I saw to contribute to it. But it was only a step at a time. And at the very beginning, I certainly did not envision that I was going to have a podcast and a website and be writing a book about robo psych.

That's a great example of you were not born as a robo psych expert. You had propensities toward various related aspects of it. But that the role of a curator is so important and that in first serving as a curator, you're becoming an expert. And isn't that interesting? I think that the big secret behind pivoting is that when you get better at having a pivot mindset and constantly experimenting, the pivot points are less sharp. They're not so shocking. These, in fact, we start to make turns continuously in succession. And that to me evokes a feeling of momentum, that when I really thought about pivoting and I even created a community called Momentum because I realized I didn't need to create the community called pivot because once people are really good at pivoting, really all they want is to feel a sense of motion, of forward progress. And there have been studies on this too. I'll see if I can find them for the show. Notes, notes that really a lot of our well being comes from a feeling of I've got some wind in my hair, you know, I'm moving along, I'm making progress. And that progress is, as all the other cliches go, 99% of the journey. It's the journey and it's these peaks, these moments of success are these punctuated memories in our lives. But that the day to day enjoyment is just moving forward and learning and growing along the way.

You know, in my life, in my work as a clinical psychologist for many years, I did a lot of work with people who were in 12 step programs. And the cliches from 12 step programs, I think are particularly powerful because they are just so simple, one of which is fake it till you make it. AA taught people to fake it till you make it. And it was kind of like, what does that mean? And it related to another one of their cliches which was keep coming back, just keep coming back to the program, just keep working the program. Even if you don't believe 100% in every little detail of what is being said, fake it till you make it. With pivoting, there are going to be days when you will be skeptical. Do not think that what you have is a steady upward line of motivation that's going to be consistent every single day. There are going to be days that are going to be lousy in which you're going to have to find a way to sustain that.

And they're built in. Not only are there going to be those days, expect them as someone who's trying to carve a new path, make an impact, innovate. It is inherent in being an innovator, or an impactor as I call them in the book, that you're blazing new trails. In fact, so many of my friends here in New York say I'm the black sheep of my friends families. And so when you're that type of.

There are going to be more tests, there is more uncertainty, there is more of those moments and those days where you question whether it's working at all. And here too we can invoke the Serenity prayer. And I love that as well. And it's give me the strength to change the things I can. And let's say in a pivot sense, what one next step can I take? So, okay, I can't control the outcome and you know, give me the strength to know the difference. But within what I can control, within what I can learn, within what I am enjoying, what can I do next? What's my one next move?

Yeah, those are. And again, you know, we're both talking about helping people to adopt a mindset towards the future that is open and that will enable them to take advantage of what's going to be presented to them.

In the case of Robo Psych, I'm often talking to people who are, are not youngsters who have been driving a truck for 20 years and now suddenly are faced with the prospect of being replaced, maybe not in the next two years, but maybe in the next five, by a long distance autonomous driving vehicle. And that's scary. And so we're talking to people who.

Are.

You know, it's not like they're at the beginning necessarily of their journey. They've been through some, maybe they've been through some successes and now they're being faced with the threat of that success going away. What do I do about it? Is the question that we're all confronted with in that kind of a moment.

That's such an important point that pivot points occur not just when we failed or we get fired, but sometimes as a product of our success. And oftentimes as that, actually a lot of times pivoting too involves letting something go, whether that's our old job or our old business or our old concept of self.

Yes.

That's sort of the wildest thing, is that a lot of this is asking us to circle all the way back to, you know, these fundamental questions that the Greeks started to ask that you brought up at the beginning of who am I? And when we decouple from our work or we're going through a transition in our work, that it does bring these questions to the forefront.

And that openness to experience that we talk about as one of the big five isn't just openness to experience the world in a different way. It's also openness to experiencing myself in a different way. One of the things that we can.

Learn most about ourselves from is when we say, I am the kind of person who. Or I am not the kind of person who you immediately, as soon as you find yourself thinking or saying those things, you know, the categories that you've already placed around your life, you've already said, oh, no, I. And by the way, those. I am this kind of person or I am not this kind of person is often accompanied by a must, I must be this kind of person, or I must not be this kind of person.

I must not, or I never do that.

Yes, I am. I must never ever be the kind of person who. That. When. If you fill in the blanks of those kinds of statements, you learn a lot about the limitations, the things that are going to hold you back from being able to say, well, maybe I am that kind of person now.

And I think the big joke of life sometimes is then five years later, we're confronted with that exact thing, or we do that exact thing, or we. We transition. And oh, man, I mean this. We go into a whole thing on judgment of whether we're judging ourselves or others or saying, I must or I should or I shouldn't. And you're right. Just that statement alone is almost an invitation to say, but what if. And of course not doing things that are morally reprehensible, but in terms of what we're willing to be open to or not. And can we let ourselves be surprised? And can we? For me, too, I've learned because I think everyone listening can look back at a time where they said, oh, I would never do that, and that it happened. And so how many times do we have to have that experience till we realize, oh, maybe I could just be more open in general because. And let myself be supportive.

You make a great point, though, when you. When you talk about doing things that are morally reprehensible. I think when we talk about pivoting and when we talk about the kinds of changes that are necessary in order to be strong at the competency of robocyc, we're not talking about.

Violating values that are fundamental to your life. So.

Right. Or even core personality types or desires.

Yes.

We're not saying, don't be who you be who you're. You know, be someone you're not.

Yes. I. I think what we are saying is that you. You are going to discover parts of yourself, not whether or not you are an embezzler. You know, we're not. We're not. We're not saying, oh, go ahead and.

Open the bank, robbing a little bit of money.

That's a good pivot. You know, you can become a thief. No, I mean, those are what. What we're saying is that you're going to. You're going to come up against some. Some barriers that are workable, barriers that are not barriers to.

Violating fundamental moral principles, but are going to ask you to test this idea of, how many people can I connect with this week that will help me to pivot more effectively. Can I. Can I do 10? Oh, no. My goodness. That would never. Okay, how about five? Can you do five? So now, you know, introverts, people who are low on the extroversion scale are going to find it difficult to do. We use the N word before networking, you know.

Which is one that we, you know, we kind of, many of us recoil from the idea of networking because we're kind of introverted a little bit, and we find that whole. That whole. The imaginary scene of what it really.

Means to network or inauthenticity.

Exactly. So we imagine a scene that is so. Oh, no, that's not me. That's certainly not me. Well, no, you don't have to be that in order to network. You don't have to be that in order to be an extrovert. You need to be interested in other people and listen to them and speak your mind with them, and that will probably have a big impact on whether or not you're networking effectively.

We're here today because our mutual friend Maxine introduced us on a whim, and then we had mutual interests, and it was natural. Yeah, I mean, to me, networking is who you would want to be friends with, and then you build from there. And what you said is so fundamental to the growth process that we do have to be willing. This is what athletics teaches. Push yourself, go outside of your Comfort zone. And in fact, I encourage people to have a hobby that has nothing to do with your career, but that teaches you failure. And mine was doing handstands and, and I failed thousands of times before I could do them successfully. And it just taught me that skill of sucking at something for a long time. I'm talking for years, but then the accomplishment over time. And that so much of this mindset is being willing to feel uncomfortable and awkward and as you said, to do it anyway.

And that's a characteristic of conscientiousness, which sticking to doing what we say we're going to do is so critical to being successful at both of, at these domains that we're talking about. RoboCyc is just another way of talking about pivoting. It's a, it's a specific.

And vice versa pivoting.

I think that, that we're looking at here where, you know, if you're not, if you're not willing to do that kind of exploration, you're not going to succeed. It doesn't matter what area it's in.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. I wanted to talk just one minute about, about a situation where we used this idea to work on our work. We had sent the questionnaire out to about 20 of our friends and contacts and we'd gotten responses from them. And we said, okay, well, that's nice.

And we realized we probably hang out with really pivotable people.

What a surprise.

We probably attract this exact type of person.

Isn't that something? Maybe we need to ask more people these questions. How are we going to do that? And what we did was to try something that we had never tried before, which was using the Amazon Mechanical Turk as the source of subjects for our test data.

Exactly. Tom had heard about Mechanical Turk. I had heard briefly, but I had never thought to use it for this. And Tom let me know for really cheap, you can put out a task and have any number of people that you set complete this task at a, at a budget or a price per completion that you, that you set. And so this, a lot of engineers are using this. They're using it for code testing. But one of the mechanical options is survey research. Yeah. And so. Exactly. So Tom kind of discovered this, then passed the baton to me. Let me tell you, I just fumbled my way through the first request. It's not like I've ever logged on to Mechanical Turk. I had no clue what I was doing, but I kind of just followed the directions. I googled things when I don't know.

The Answer very robo psyche.

Yeah, I use the help center that's there. And I put in our pivotability link. I defined the parameters. I think I put that I wanted 26 responses within an hour for my budget was $13 or something like that.

Yeah.

Way up. And the crazy thing was the floodgates opened so quickly once I hit go. We got something like 40 or 50 responses in 10 minutes. And these are volunteers, by the way. They're not volunteers because they get paid a little bit. Task. And this is something. It's. It's like the gig economy on steroids because they're taking a survey in less than five minutes and they're getting paid.

Yes.

And so they're doing this all day long. And it's not. No one's forced to do it. They're voluntarily signing up and they get to choose the tasks they want to do. These Turks or Turkers, I don't know.

What they call how pivotable the, the, the, the. The typical mechanical Turk is. Right. I mean, in order to, to the. They. These are people making a living who.

Are working in sometimes data entry. It could be anything.

Absolutely. In these micro tasks that they're doing. And it certainly enabled us to get another body of data very quickly that we could look at and go, okay, well, okay, these questions seem to work pretty well. At least they discriminate among different categories. People tell us that the descriptions are, are fairly reasonably representative of their approaches. Okay. And we could have never done that.

Right.

Had we not done that experiment.

Exactly. And that was introducing now double the respondents, if not quadruple, where we could analyze the data. And now here we are on phase three, which is releasing this to all of you, everyone who's here in mine and Tom's communities. We're saying, okay, the doors are open. And we're also saying, Kavya, this is still in beta and you're getting this early and you're helping us learn. And all the data is. Is anonymous. We do ask demographic questions and, but we only review in aggregate. So we do ask for your feedback at the end. Were your results accurate. And so now this is phase three. And this is, I think, part of what we're saying too, which is we did not wait until we had the perfect survey instrument and then design brand strategy for it for six months before we ever sent it out to one person. We are scrappily testing this at every turn. And now we, we would, we would love, and we hope that even though it's still in beta, that all of you listening will go take it and give us feedback, but that it's valuable for you too, even in beta. And dropping the perfectionism is a huge part of pivoting effectively.

This is such an important.

Lesson for us all to remember. We're not going to be perfect when we start doing something new. One of the most most powerful Zen ideas that I ever learned was.

Zen mind, beginner's mind. This idea that we have to look if we can look at the world with fresh eyes, if we can look at the world as a beginner without all of the assumptions that tell us, oh, this is never going to work, this situation will never work. Oh my goodness. If it's not perfect, this is going to happen and that's going to happen. I We are destined to fail. The only way we're going to let ourselves succeed is by using a beginner approach, which is trying and seeing how things happen.

Tom, thank you so much for today's wonderful conversation and for being such an awesome collaborator and friend on this pivotability index. For everyone listening, if you want to take the survey, go to pivotmethod.com IQ.

Well, it's been this, of course, the conversation, as anybody who can listen, listens to it, could tell we can have these conversations very easily and we can have them for a very long time. Thanks very much, Jenny. And the book is out September 6th.

That's right. And very exciting. Grab your copy.

Very exciting.

There's a whole toolkit online as well to help with your current and future Pivots, and that's@pivotmethod.com toolkit which, by the way, looks great. Thank you so much.

The website looks terrific.

I just moved all my sites to Squarespace after 10 years on WordPress and so relieved.

I wish they were sponsoring us, but they're not.

One day. One day. Here's hoping we're going to send them this episode and see what it takes.

Let's do that. Jay, Blake, thanks a lot.

Thanks so much, Tom.

Bye bye.

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Pivot Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did did. And Pivot is officially out, so grab your copy wherever books are sold. Even better, tell a friend and leave a review on Amazon reviews, help other readers decide whether to purchase a copy, and it helps build a lot of momentum in these early days of the launch. Thank you all so much in advance. I couldn't do this without you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivot list get show notes for from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always?

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes for from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.