291: Job Therapy: Identifying The Source Of Your Career Dissatisfaction

Here's the other reason why you should stop doing this, people. Your goalposts change all the time. Write down what you think would make you feel like you've made it today, and by tomorrow that answer is going to be different. And so maybe it's 4,000 followers. You get to 4,000 and you feel good for like half a second and you're like, it's actually five. I actually need five to feel good. So you're torturing yourself with this moving goal that is unattainable. You're never going to get there, you're never going to find it, unless you change your goal, unless you change your definition of purpose.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino, and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life, to rise up, speak up, and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week, I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts, and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hi everyone, it's Kathy. I'm thrilled you're here today because I have something truly exciting to share. My eight week live course, the Most Powerful you, is now open for early bird enrollment. The course kicks off October 3rd, and if you register by September 25th, you'll save $300 and unlock seven exclusive bonuses. This course is the perfect companion to my book, the Most Powerful youl. And I can confidently say there's nothing else like it out there. Over our eight weeks together, I'll personally guide you through critical steps to close the seven most damaging power and confidence gaps that hold women back from creating a fulfilling, impactful, and successful career. What's the ultimate outcome? By closing these gaps, you'll completely transform how you see yourself and how you communicate, lead and engage with others. This profound shift empowers you to finally overcome those lingering, difficult challenges so you can make the impact you've always dreamed of. Don't miss out. Spots are limited, so Register today@mostpowerfulyou.com to claim your $300 savings and bonuses. I can't wait to start this transformative journey with you on October 3rd. See you there. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. And my amazing guest sitting in the middle of Manhattan, Tessa west, who's just published a fantastic book you're all going to love and I. I know that this will be eye opening and insightful for you, so we're in for a big ride. We are talking about job therapy, and I have a lovely little title here identifying the true source of your career dissatisfaction, which Tessa is an amazing expert at. So, Tessa, thank you for. For being here with me. So.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited today.

And look at us. We laughed. We. We got the memo about what colors to wear. Absolutely not. But it's a rare color. I can't believe we've matched.

I know.

So perfectly. So check it out on YouTube, people. You'll see it. All right, let me tell you about Tessa, who has already joined the podcast. I think it was episode 240. We'll link to it on how to handle the seven jerks at work. You really get to the heart of it, my dear, don't you? All right, let me tell you about Tessa. Dr. Tessa west is professor of psychology at New York University. Love it. Where she is a leading expert on the science of social relationships. I would love to dig in more about that in a minute. Her academic research and writing for the media focuses on how to improve communication between employees, bosses, and hiring professionals across workplace settings. She has over 100 academic publications. It's too much. It's amazing. Not too much. Never too much. And is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Her work has been covered in a long list, and you can read that down below, but including Scientific American, the New York Times, Financial Times, the Guardian, cnn, cnbc, abc, World News Time, Bloomberg, and the US Supreme Court. I gotta hear a little more about that. So, yes, we talked about your first book, Jerks at Work, and your new book that just came out in July, Job Therapy, Finding Work that works for you, which shares all about finding out and understanding the psychological source of your unhappiness at work, and then taking a series of carefully orchestrated steps to find a career or job with long term staying power. All right, my dear. You know, this is absolutely right up my alley. But you know what's so interesting, Tessa? You and I have talked about this. There could be a thousand people or a million people looking at the deeper causes of challenge, problematic emotions, dissatisfaction. And we're all coming at it in a different way, which. Which is good for all of us, but it's fascinating to me. So can we just start with. And I think I might know the answer. You know, the key premise of this book, which I think is around how we look at our career as a relationship, as A partner and. And why you wrote this book. I mean, you have a hundred publications. You had to choose one direction. Can you start there for us?

Yes. I think, you know, honestly, this approach to thinking about your relationship with your career and reframing your career like a partner kind of came out of teaching relationships at nyu. I teach a close relationship course which is all about the whole trajectory from initial attraction to dating to having those difficult conversations to even breaking up. And we kind of start at the beginning with attraction and end at the end of how do you dump someone? How do you break up?

Must be the most popular class at nyu. The answer, I mean, everybody's gone through it pretty much.

Yeah. It is eye opening. And kind of what I found over time is that the same types of things that people struggle with in the romantic relationships or in their close relationships, even with their aging parents or their children, these issues around feeling underappreciated, feeling like you're in love with someone who doesn't love you back, feeling like you're. You've committed to something that you. You don't know if you should continue to commit to, you're having an identity crisis. That language started to kind of permeate the workspace. So people would come to me and say, I have all these complex emotions around my job. I feel ambivalent. I love it and I hate it. I feel like I put so much into it and it doesn't love me back. And I started seeing this parallel in my coaching world and dealing with C Suite execs. The complex, messy stickiness that is us at work looked a lot like how we talk about our romantic relationships and the same struggles with communication, not saying the thing we need to say. So I thought, you know, we're pretty good about embracing therapy for all kinds of other relationships, but we don't think about it in our relationship with our career. So why not just embrace that same perspective and really flip the script a little bit on how we think about our jobs?

I can't tell you how much I resonate with this. Can I amplify two things and tell me if. If this sounds right? I've often. Because I spent a little time as a therapist and now in career coaching, what I see is when this is a little bit of an aside, but people will spend their hard earned money on therapy for family and relational issues.

Yep.

But when it comes to coaching, they don't see it as the same critical importance. And that's really unfortunate because most of us are working more than we're doing. Anything else often. So I absolutely love that you saw that parallel, and it was so clear. And the second thing I love about it, you know my book the Most Powerful you, about the seven damaging power gaps? What I always have to teach is, by the way, you're a person when you show up to your career. They're not. They're inextricably linked. They're not separate. But so many people in my field. Tell me what you find, view it separately. They'll only talk about really dry aspects of career, how you're interviewing, what your resume looks like.

These are important.

These are tools. Do you find that, too, in your world that people bifurcate?

Yeah. They say things like, but it's just a job. And it's a way of telling themselves that they ought to have a psychological separation between what they do at work and their emotions. And I'm like, that's just not how the brain works. In fact, we know research on stress contagion, for example, the stress we feel at work is more likely to show up at home than the other way around because we spend more time at work. And even in marital therapy, a lot of the conversations are actually about people's careers, how they're feeling left out, that they prioritize their partner's career, and now they feel held back. And so these themes crop up if you go to therapy for relationships, but we don't ever stop, like, have a. Just kind of a separate therapeutic relationship around our career. And I think it's unfortunate because we're denying ourselves this opportunity to explore timeline changes in our relationship with our career. This idea that you can be satisfied. And it goes through peaks and valleys in the same way that marital satisfaction drops when you have kids, drops when you retire, peaks in the beginning. And all of that sort of complex stuff we don't process with our careers. We focus on structural things, our compensation package, where we're living. It's like going to a therapist and saying, if I just had a bigger house, my marriage would be fixed. If I just made more money, my relationship with my career would be fixed. We know that's irrational when it comes to our interpersonal relationships. Yet we do it all the time with our careers. And I. And I just find that kind of a missed opportunity.

How fantastically interesting. And I want you all to know, people, yes, I have a little bit of prep material, but I go in different places. So Tessa has an isn't. Hasn't been prepped. On this question I'm about to ask, I find it so fascinating that with all the work you've done on social relationships, the two books you've chosen to write are about careers. Can I ask you the honest reason about that? Like, what could one reason be? There have been 2 billion books written about. I don't know the number really, but about social interaction. And that has been written about ad nauseam. And, you know, you tell me if I'm wrong. I don't see as much new, brand new, eye opening, shocking material about social interaction as I do about career. Is it that you thought. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but this is where I can make a bigger difference because I don't see people talking about this. Do you understand my question?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, honestly, I wrote Jerks at Work, my first book, because I was struggling with being a jerk. You were being a jerk. I was a jerk. I was in charge of part of the psychology department and I was in charge of a move. And I was kind of mean to people about office spaces. And I can't say that. And I study these things and I'm probably a little bit more perceptive than your average professor. And I still struggled. And I just remember having these aha moments, like, if I can't work through the sticky problems of being a leader in this organization without pissing people off, without making people cry. No one receives this kind of training. And I walk into the career space and no one's talking about these ambivalent feelings, these feelings of insecurity. And I really did think I could sort of leverage my knowledge about interpersonal interaction. In particular, the things that we want to talk about but don't. Taboo topics, things that people are feeling but are afraid to. And I really thought, I think we should leverage some of that information in the workspace. And I think that there's not a ton of professors who actually don't use a lot of jargon and just kind of are straight shooters on this topic. And so that's where I felt like I could really leverage my expertise. But really, I think both of these books too. I also needed job therapy. I came out of tenure, I felt a little depressed about my job. I didn't know what to do with myself. And I had an identity crisis. And that's why I started writing books, started writing trade books, because I needed something else to do. But I didn't really process it as an identity crisis until I actually started doing my own research on this and thought, oh my gosh, that's exactly what I was going through. And I actually think that's pretty common, but no one talks about it here.

I interviewed you on Jerks at Work, and I didn't ever know that you felt like you had been.

Oh, yeah.

Did you realize that after the. After the fact, as you were writing or while you were doing it, while you were being a jerk?

You're like, while I was being a jerk, I sat on the subway and wrote out the outline of the chapters.

Here's every way I'm being a jerk. You know, I think those are the most compelling books that come from, like, every thing I've ever written. You know, the seven power gaps. I had them all. It makes it for really juicy content. Thank you for being so honest and sharing that. So I have in front of me the table of contents of your book and the five common. They're almost like their profiles, aren't they? But they're sources of dissatisfaction. I'm thinking we have a little time. Can you go just list the five for me? And then what we could do maybe, is talk about the three that you see the most and describe them and give one strategy that people. Maybe the beginning strategy, when people are like, that's me now. What do I do? What do you think? Can we do that?

Yeah, no, that sounds great. So the first is the crisis of identity. I've been working hard at this for a long time, and I wake up in the middle of the night in an existential crisis. Is this what I want to do with my life? So that's a pretty common one. Drifted apart. I used to recognize this job. I used to love it. And it's no longer sparking joy. And I don't know if it's me who's changed or it's the job or the whole industry.

Okay. Do they do. Is that about the role, or can it also be the whole field? The whole career?

It can be both.

Getting law practice or law in general. Boy, I have. Right?

And actually getting to the answer to that question is one of the key pieces for these people, because often they don't know.

That's right. That's right.

Is it the role? Is it the whole industry?

Right. Is it my terrible, narcissistic boss?

Okay, yeah.

All right. That's drifted apart. Okay.

And then we have the stretch too thin. So this is all of us. Honestly, we all either take on too many roles at work in an effort to get ahead, or we're terrible at task switching and interruptions and so forth. So that's really about kind of juggling all of the things, doing too much and therefore doing nothing. Then we have. The next two chapters are about a job that you love that doesn't love you back. So the runner up, no matter how hard I try, I cannot land that promotion or raise, and it's not clear to me what I'm doing wrong. And then the underappreciated star, which is kind of a special type of runner up, who feels like their star status isn't being appreciated. And I think for them, they often don't really know whether there's even a market for stars. They assume there is, but there often is not.

And so those are at market meaning when I interview, nobody seems to care about what I've done or in the current role.

No one is going to pay for me and what I'm expecting to be compensated for. It's a little bit like the difference between an amazing wine and a pretty good wine. The Amazing wine cost $30. The pretty good wine cost 5. Most people can't tell the difference and don't care about spending the extra $25.

So it's. It's kind of related to compensation in that.

Yeah, compensation or appreciation or opportunities.

Got it. I have a question. I always love to think if I can answer it before I ask it. Let me ask it. Do you see different groups, whether it's cultures, gender, neurodiversity, you know, struggling more with one or two of these than other groups?

Oh, I love that question. I think gender is a huge predictor of feeling stretched too thin.

Right. I think there's over functioning, I call it, you know.

Yep. There are major burdens on women to do all the things all at once. And I think we saw that emergence especially during COVID But, you know, just in general, I've seen that a lot. I think the crisis of identity happens to more seasoned career people, people who've been around for a while and are often. I see this a lot with millennials, Gen Xers, you know, the same time you have kind of a midlife crisis or a leadership crisis, we see that kind of with. With more with older folks. And then I think things like the runner up tend to be in specific industries, hierarchical industries, zero sum, not so much the helping industries. But in law, we see this a lot in medicine, where you're trying to become a partner, where you're trying to become the chief surgeon, where you want to make it to the C suite, those types of things. Things where making it to the top is what you're always striving for and you're not really considered making it until that happens.

Wow, fascinating. You know, I, I just wrote a piece on developmental stage in life that, you know, when you're 40, potentially you have fewer years ahead of you than behind you. And I see almost unilaterally, people feel differently at 40 and 45 and 50.

Yeah.

Meaning and purpose become more important. And in the beginning, I think most people are not thinking of that. Do you see that in any of your profiles here? Or any of these causes of dissatisfaction? Like, that's. It was good when I was 25, but this is stupid.

Oh yeah. Everything feels stupid when you're 45. And I think, I think the problem though is I'm being a little bit tight, but I do a lot, I have a lot of jobs and it, it all kind of feels stupid at some level. I love that you say that and I think it's because. And, but here's the real problem. I don't know how to make it not feel stupid. And I think that's everyone's like, meaning making purpose. I'm actually working on a piece right now for the Guardian on are we actually trying too hard to find purpose? Should we maybe lower the bar a little bit? Do we need to be so identified with our careers? And I think kind of one dangerous place I find a lot of people, especially with identity crisis, is they have. They're high on what's called identity centrality. So their job defines them. Right. If you think about your self esteem going up and down, if it's completely tethered to your success, success at work, not other domains. You know, you lose sleep mostly because of job stuff, or you feel good about yourself mostly because of success at work. You're high on centrality. But people are often also low on identity satisfaction. This job defines me and I hate it. That is a very scary place to land. And when you talk about meaning and purpose and striving for meaning and purpose, often what I find is those people who are high on centrality, low on satisfaction, have this guilt of like, this defines me, but I hate it. But why do I hate it? I'm actually pretty good at it. And it's actually rewarding me on all the ways in which I strived in my 20s and 30s to be rewarded. And yet none of it is giving me that dopamine burst in the way that it used to. And I don't know what to do with that. I'm depressed about that and I don't know what's going to fix it. And I think that is a State A lot of us in our late 30s, 40s and 50s are kind of struggling with.

When I talk to you, my head explodes like the pistons fire every which way. What. What occurs to me here is two things when we talk about impact and which is a lot of what the women I work with want. You had said. I'm not sure why every. Why it's gotten so I also see that kind of the onslaught of social media and vanity metrics.

Oh God.

And you know, I've got blip followers on LinkedIn and I'm proud of that. I'm proud of having a big follower. But you following. But it can go away tomorrow. LinkedIn could change something and there goes the algorithm and there I go. And you know, I'm sure that'll be difficult if that happens for me, but I feel like meaning and purpose and impact have become a thing that people are trying to measure in external ways that they don't have.

Oh God.

As a right. As opposed to. I used to feel like I have three people who work for me and helping them feel good about their work was impact.

Yep.

Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely.

Be some huge grandiose thing that includes a vanity metric sometimes. What do you think?

Yeah, the vanity metrics are out of control and I am super guilty of this. When you're a thirsty author, you go through this thing where you wake up in the morning and you check your LinkedIn and you see how many new followers you got and you look at how many of the notifications are about you or about other people that have nothing to do with you. And then you go on your Instagram and then you go. And then you Google yourself and you look at whether there's any news that came out and then you look at your Amazon and see if you got any new reviews. And it's like the cycle of doom that every. That every author I know goes through. And in the problem with it, I mean, in addition to it just being completely stupid and I actually had to cut myself off from this for the main reason that all this was creating self interruptions and I wasn't getting any of my academic work done because I was checking my damn LinkedIn so many times a day just to see how many people like me. It's really embarrassing. But I think I'm not alone here, you know, and in academia it's how many citations do I have what is what's called an H index. How popular is my research? And I think we see a lot of flexing on social media. I finally Found a job that gave me purpose. And here's a picture of me on the beach thinking about that purposeful position that I finally landed. And it's gross. And I think it's also not real because we're all secretly actually doing the thing that I just described it. And believe me, your number of LinkedIn followers is just. It's insane and it makes me jealous.

And.

Yes. And all of those gross things that people don't like to admit. And my whole publicity team is like, whoa, look at her. You know, so. And then you have all these people that are like checking your metrics. Right. And it's. I feel like a supermodel who's been put on the scale every five minutes where I'm looking at that number and my whole self esteem is going up or down. And, and it's funny because I'm actually not high on what's called social comparison orientation. I don't naturally compare myself to other people very much. But being an author forces you into this metric and I think it's a dangerous place of. Here's the other reason why you should stop doing this, people. Your goalposts change all the time. Write down what you think would make you feel like you've made it today, and by tomorrow that answer is going to be different. And so maybe it's 4,000 followers. You get to 4,000 and you feel good for like half a second and you're like, it's actually five. I actually need five to feel good. So you're torturing yourself with this moving goal that is unattainable. You're never going to get there, you're never going to find it unless you change your goal, unless you change your definition of purpose.

Oh, I love it so much. The other thing I want to ask your thoughts on what you see when you talked about, you know, I don't have passion for this and maybe we don't need to have explosive passion. What I often find, and I'm sure you walk people through this too, sometimes the passion isn't going to be your job. Like, I'm a singer on the side and I was married to a famous jazz percussionist. He got his passion through making money through, I mean, through music in every possible way. Composing, playing. I never wanted to make money through music. It's not what I want. But if I'm not single, singing regularly and performing in, you know, nice venues, etc, I'm not fully myself.

Yeah.

So in a way that's just like a relationship. Your partner isn't going to Be everything to you.

Yeah, yeah.

It can't. I don't. Is. I don't think so. Is that what, do you see that in, in your book and talk about that?

Yes. So my colleague Eli Finkel has a book called the all or Nothing Marriage. And I think it parallels the way we think about our, our careers in a lot of ways. And so he talks about, and I promise I'll get back to job stuff, but he talks about how in the 50s, a marriage was structural. It provided stability, but you didn't expect your partner to be your best friend, your career coach, and the person who helps you grow. You had a social network for that. And over time, we've expected our partners to be all the things they need to be hot, they need to make money, they need, they need to support all of our changes. They need to also be our best friend and they need be an amazing parent. And so he talks about how when we start expecting all of everything from one thing, in that case it's a marriage. But I think we can draw that parallel to our careers because we do expect our careers to fix a lot of our life problems, to make us feel good, to give us purpose, to give us well being. Now all of those things, we're really setting ourselves up for disappointment in a lot of ways. We're also expecting satisfaction to peak and to stay there. And I think any relationship, there's peaks and valleys in satisfaction. In your job, you can have good identity days and bad identity days. You can drift apart, you can fall back in love. And so this book is a lot about looking for stability in your unhappiness, in those patterns, looking for what's triggering your stress, consistently looking for signs that you're sensitive to intermittent reinforcement in ways that maybe you shouldn't be. You know, you're so hungry for love that when your boss says one nice thing, you're like, okay, I am meant for this job, I'm meant for this. Even though the other nine times out of 10, they're mean to you. We do that in relationships too. We cling to those things. And so those patterns from all or nothing marriage, I think are really reflected in job therapy and sort of how we think about our careers as a relationship partner. And much the same way that we've changed how we think about our long term relationship.

Romantic relationship partners, very important, very important, and I think very accessible. We all know probably a little more how we feel about our partners and our friends and can relate. I love it. There's one other thing that I Want us to do? Talk about your book more. There's this other thing I know you've have a lot of research on. People will come to me, not so much now, but in the past they would say things like, I want to be like you, that work is like play and it never feels like work a day in your life. And I said, where? What, what gave you the impression that's happening? I mean, I'm running a business and coaching, the act of coaching is 20% of it. The rest is everything else you have to do to run a business.

Yeah.

What I do say is it's work and it is not like going to the movies and it's not like going to the beach. But if you're in, in the right, I love your thought on the right path. The work feels worth it. The work feels sustainable. Not every minute, every, you know, everybody feels at one point like, I've had it with this, I'm going to go be a blah, blah, blah, run a bed and breakfast, probably. But generally the work is giving you a sense of reward, that you are on a path that is rewarding and fits overall. Would you, would you agree with that or add to that?

I think so too. I think one thing that you highlighted that's really important is we often see the final product from people. We don't see the behind the scenes. So people see that I wrote a book, I'm on a podcast, that I have a flexible schedule, but they don't know what the day in the life actually looks like for my career and how mundane most of the activities actually are. And so often we're so high level with purpose that we aren't focusing on the right things. And I think that the best thing you can do to explore a career, to see what it's actually like, is learning the hidden curriculum, talking to people about how their day actually breaks down hour by hour. So if you were to look at my day, it's a lot of reading documents, analyzing data, getting models to converge, figuring out why a data set is wrong. It's pretty low level stuff. Stuff that is not sexy, that no one sees, that doesn't make most people think, wow, that's what a professor is. And I'm a huge fan of trying to get breaking people's schedules down. In those networking conversations where you're just like, tell me what you do every day from 9 to 10, from 10 to 11 to see what it's like. I mean, if people were to ask you that, it's probably a lot of boring stuff.

That makes tedious. A lot of tedious. This business stuff. This makes me want to do a day in the Life series, you know, just for 15 minutes. Walk us through what you're. But, Tessa, not a lot of people are as honest as you. You know, I will have. I'm sure I'd have people on, and they're waxing. I don't mean to put anyone down, but some people just don't want to really reveal that it's not what it looks like, you know, but what a fantastic idea. Oh, look at this. All right, we have a few min. Now, can you. Of these five, do you have data on, you know, the crisis of identity? That's 42%, blah, blah, blah. Can we talk about. Just give us those numbers, and then maybe we can talk about the three that are most prevalent, if that's okay.

Yeah, sure. I'm gonna have to dig up the specific numbers of each of these, but crisis of identity is, I think, kind of hands down the most common one. It's something like 40ish percent. I think that one is incredibly popular. Most people actually fall into at least two of the categories. I think Stretch Too Thin is also kind of like an incredibly popular one that everyone's in. I think probably the least popular one is the runner up. Or, sorry, not the runner up. The underappreciated star. Because I hold people to a pretty high standard to defining what a star is, which is kind of this combination of you have a skill that nobody else has at work, and also, you're definitely the best at it. And so if everyone has something and they're all good at it, then that doesn't make you a star. It has to actually be something pretty rare. And so I think.

And I just tell you from my research, women won't. Zero women will say that. I can't get women to even say what their special talents are. And I'm like, really? You have none of them. So that's that. You know, that doesn't surprise me that that's less so. Let's start with the crisis of identity. If you have. Just tell us. So people, listen in here with two sentences and feel in your heart, do you have this? And let's hear what Tessa tells us to do here.

So I think the first place to start is really just getting to the bottom of the question. Do you still feel like your old career defines who you are? And ask yourself, how would you feel if you could never do this again? That simple question is often something that we use in goal pursuit Literature to ask how willing people are to give up on a goal. If I could never do this again, how would I feel? And you should ask yourself that question consistently for about a month until you can really believe that it's time to start exploring new identities. The main piece of advice I have for these folks is you have to start dating new career identities before. Before you leave your job. Do not quit with a big black pit of nothingness in that identity part of you. Because a lot like breaking up a marriage where you're like, who am I? Without this person, you're going to panic and you're going to get into an on again, off again relationship with your career. So I go through the steps of how you can kind of date and develop what's called identity clarity around new careers before you actually take the leap. It's kind of like onboarding your identity to something new before you offboard your current one.

I love it. And it's essential. Can you go back to this? The question, what was it? Can you imagine not doing this?

How would you feel if you could never do this again?

Let me just ask this. I feel like 80% of people would say, how would I feel? I'd be overjoyed. I don't ever want to do this job.

Yeah.

Most people don't love their jobs.

They don't. But if you ask them to answer that question twice a week for two months, there will be days where they feel good and they would say, ooh, I don't know, I actually had a really good work day. And so it's less about just feeling negative, it's more about consistency in those feelings. Because if you're unsure of your identity, the answer to that question is going to bounce around quite a bit. It's like having a hot date night with your partner. All those feelings rush back, even though you're not really into them anymore.

I see. And do you find I'm thinking of people, you know, again, I'm a career coach, so they're coming to me because they have challenges in their. They think that are in their career. But I find that people who would answer that I would feel overjoyed. I'm sick of this. I'm getting mistreated. It's often not. How do I want to put it? Directly related to that one job?

Yeah.

This kind of crisis has followed them along because it's often formed in childhood. How our boundaries, our inability to speak up, our inability to recognize that we have a special talent. Do you find that too?

Yeah, absolutely. I think A lot of the reasons why people land in this position over and over again is because they're not great at finding what those core, I call them keeper skills in this book are, but those core skills so executed on in certain specific tasks in certain specific contexts and that they have figured out how to transfer from one career to another. And so what they do is they start over a lot. They're always kind of hopping into a new job, hopping into a new career instead of finding what they want to keep about themselves, anchoring their searches on those things they say, get rid of all of it. You know, I'm starting completely from scratch. And it's a little bit like I'm going to keep going back to relationships. You know, my ex husband was a pretty cold and aloof guy and he's not going to listen to this. So I can say this. So you swing back in the other and you do something the opposite, opposite of that.

All that. The pendulum effect.

The pendulum effect. We are like, I want nothing in common with this old job. Nothing. It's a mental job. I'm going to do a physical job. It's a people job. I'm going to do an alone job. And so we drop it all. And I think we should be doing the opposite. I think you should need to actually do the work to figure out what about this. I like not about the job, but about myself. In this job, you know what makes me feel good. And I'm going to be very careful to make sure in my network conversations, I ask people, how are you executing on this skill in your job and what's the context in which you're doing it? Will this skill of mine be valued? But you have to know what your skills are and what you love. And then you can figure out what's fungible, what you can bring to the next thing. Don't do the thing where you scrap it all and date the guy who's the opposite.

It tend to work so well.

You will hop from frying pan to frying pan if you do that.

I love it. And everyone, I want you to read Tess's book immediately. And I will say I have something called a career path assessment. 13 pages of questions I wish someone had asked me. But what's interesting that supports what you're saying. I asked them every job you ever had, what you love, what you hated, what was your greatest accomplishment, the skills you used and what you never want to do again.

Yep, people will.

You know, let's say they have eight jobs, the set, the sixth, seventh and eighth, they'll rate them a two, a one. But the beginning ones are 10 to nine.

Yeah.

So I'll say what happened? Well, they forgot.

They forgot.

Actually I moved over to consultancy and what I really love. Yeah, you forgot. So this is so true. This is just so true. And so the next one stretch too thin. I'm dying to know. And you know, I know we had to let you go soon. This is so many people, so many women too. Where do, where do people begin to address this?

There's two issues here. The first is that we often take on roles that we think will give us the kind of visibility we need to get ahead. But they don't. And this happens to women all the time. These are often roles that make us well liked. Running an employee resource group is kind of a common one. Communal roles. Do you get to press the flesh of someone in the C suite if you run an erg? Absolutely. Do they care about that at all during a promotion conversation? They do not. And so what I've learned is one question when you're asked to take on stuff, when you step in and help a team member, when your boss calls you at 10pm, you need to know the answer to the question. Is the work I'm doing at this role going to come up during a promotion conversation? Not will it help me get promoted or is it valued? Is it even talked about? And you can ask that of many leaders, not just your boss, but anyone else in the room. Your boss often asks you to do things that will benefit them, that they have no intention of revealing, either because it makes them look bad, that they're handing off work to others, or. Or it's simply not relevant for who gets promoted. And I think that's the number one mistake people make. They think their roles are valued, that they give them status and they do not. They make them well liked, they make them known. But that is not the same thing as status and prestige that you need to get ahead. So be very careful about the roles you take on. And before you take on any, ask that question, will my work be discussed in promotion or anyone's work in this role we discussed in promotion decisions? And I think the second piece is really about interruptions. This is about task switching. I found in my research that most interruptions are self interruptions. We can't blame other people for the fact that we go into our Slack channel in the middle of editing a document, that we violate our own rules about our smart time. And I think I actually talked to a neuroscience about neurologically what Happens when we task switch is that we're not able to form episodic memories of the work we're doing. And so the reason why it's so hard to jump back in is because we never formed the memories of the work in the first place.

Is that a matter of time? You got to give it seven consecutive minutes to have a memory or something.

Something like that. But the memories get stitched together in the hippocampus. Episodic memories do. And if you interrupt, if you stop what you're doing to read an email or someone calls you, that memory actually never gets consolidated at the basic neurological level. And so when you go to recall, it's not there. Right. You never formed the memory. So it's not that you forgot what you were working on. It was never encoded in the first place. It's like not paying attention during a conversation. You don't. You don't remember what your partner told you hate for dinner because you didn't encode it to begin with. You were distracted during that conversation. The same thing happens to our work.

Fascinating. I want to go back for a minute because it hits. It hits my heart. You said if you volunteer for folks who don't know what ERG is Employee resource group, they're usually non funded and that makes me very angry. If you have a woman's leadership group and you don't have a gosh darn dollar going to that, what do you think that means about the company's caring about women's leadership? But if you do take it on, I'm just going to say this. Okay. Maybe you in your promotion discussion that boss doesn't give a. You darn well better make it matter.

Yep.

That, you know, I. You can even call out the elephant in the room. You know, I understand this is a voluntary role, but I do need to point out the seven leadership things I got from this.

Yep.

That make me a better leader because of it. So what I'm saying is we can shape this a little more than it's perhaps sounding. That you darn well better know what it's giving you and you better articulate that in a powerful way. And if they don't care, maybe it's not the right ecosystem for you. What do you think?

Yeah. Absolutely. So I was gonna say if the answer is we don't care, your next step is to figure out how can you actually communicate the importance of that role on your resume and in cover letters and really using the right language to highlight the skills that you had in that. But not Just saying. I became a leader when I ran, you know, this women's leadership group, but I became a leader and I learned X and I'm gonna transfer that skill to this new job by doing Y. I think the main thing is you have to do the homework for people. You have to explain to them the transfer, how X becomes Y in this new role, how what you learned in that employee resource group can be transferred as a leader in this new role that is outside of that domain. But people are cognitively busy and they're lazy and they spend about 14 seconds on a resume and cover letter or your boss listening to you. So you have to connect the dots for them. Don't expect them to see those dots connected because they aren't as motivated as you. And I think there's also a little bit of like a spotlight effect. We assume that they see how my leadership running this group could then be used to run this other thing that really matters for their financial bottom line. They don't. You have to tell them, here's exactly how it matters so much.

I'm sitting here looking at you at nyu, and I so want to take a course with you. I want to be physically in the room with you. We'll talk about it later. To me, you're so inspiring and I. I find that your grounded perspective in research, but also your self awareness. You know, the fact that you thought I am a jerk at work. Let me write a book.

I'm probably overly self worm. You want me to throw myself under the bus? I will tell you all my bad habits, all my mistakes.

Better you than someone else telling you. I can't thank you enough. Any parting words for anyone who resonates with what we've discussed? What. What do you want to leave them with?

I would say, you know, this sounds like a heavy lift, like a lot of homework. And I think anytime you really want to know yourself, I wouldn't trust your instincts of what you think is going on with your emotions, with your stress, with your relationship, with your career. Collect data on yourself, fill out these questionnaires and try to be kind of a scientific observer of your own experiences. I certainly didn't see things about myself until I started actually collecting real data and graphing it out and looking for patterns. Because our memories are fallible, we have a lot of motivated cognition. And so just know that that's just a human experience and that, you know, I give you the tools to sort of help you reflect and collect those data so that you can really learn yourself. And it's going to take some time. It's not going to happen overnight. But I think the journey's worth it and, you know, hopefully you'll learn some lessons you can carry with you no matter what your career trajectory is.

That is a beautiful statement and uplifting. We're all in the same boat. We all don't really see ourselves the way we are. We're. Most of us are a little too hard on ourselves. Yeah. That's why actually mentorship and sponsorship, that can be so helpful. Thank you for being here. And where do we send people? Where do they soak up the book? Where do they get all your amazing insights?

So you can go to Tessa west, author dot com. I have my quizzes there. I'm also putting a ton of resources, my daily stress test, networking guides, all kinds of, you know, little resources for you. And my book is on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

We're gonna go check out, you know the numbers right now. No, we're not. Metrics.

Terrible. Don't look at metrics, people.

Thank you so much for taking your precious time in the middle of the 500 things you do. It's so eye opening and illuminating and uplifting. Thank you, Tessa.

Thank you, people.

You know, I say this every time. I can't. Not if you don't have a question for, for us, for Tessa. I don't think we're doing our job here because it should spark. Wait a minute, wait a minute. What she said here. I have to rethink that. So wherever you see this on social media, anywhere, please, if you want to ask a question, ask. We'll do our best, best to answer the best way we can and share it with anyone you know. Please, please. I, I really think pouring into this book could be a life changer for you. I hope you found it helpful and have a wonderful two weeks of Finding Brave and we'll see you next time. Thanks again, Tessa.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out findingbrave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding Brave.