Your Brain Needs More Space, Not More Hacks | Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff | The Art of Charm

is your procrastination is just a signal from your brain trying to tell you that something is not quite working right now. So instead of trying to push through using your willpower and discipline and blaming yourself for procrastinating, what would it look like to just have this conversation and say, hi procrastination, you're back. Hello. What are you trying to tell me?

Anne-Laure is a former Google executive who went back to university to Anne-Laure Le Cunff from King's College in London. Her new book is Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. And she shares why SMART goals fail and what works instead, how to turn procrastination into your secret weapon for growth, how to design tiny experiments that create massive life changes, and build momentum without waiting for the perfect opportunities. Welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'd love to hear your own personal journey with tiny experiments. What was that moment for you that it clicked?

So I started my career at Google and up to this point I had a very linear path. So I had a very clear vision of what success looked like, how to manage my work, my time, my energy, my relationships. Literally everything. I had a plan and I thought that if you knew what you wanted in life and you worked really hard, then you would get it. Until I had a health scare and I burned out at work, which made me reconsider everything that I thought to be true. I left my job and I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience. And this is where I discovered the experimental mindset, which is basically how scientists explore the world, how they relate to uncertainty, how they design experiments to ask questions and see what works and doesn't for them. So Tiny Experiments, my book, is really about applying this experimental mindset, being curious about challenges, and designing your own experiments so you can figure out your answers.

I know for a lot of our audience, when they think about that linear path, the first thing that comes to mind is SMART goals. But yet we've all had SMART goals fail us. What are we doing wrong with goal setting and, and how should we be looking at setting those goals for ourselves?

The big difference between a linear goal or a SMART goal and a tiny experiment is that in the case of a goal, you have a very clear idea of the destination, the outcome that you want. So you have a very binary definition of success and failure. Either you get there and that's success, or you don't get there and that's failure. With an experiment, success is learning something new. So even if the outcome is not what you expected, even if it looks different, and, uh, even if it doesn't look as good as you wanted it to be, as long as you learn something new, then this is success. So for anyone listening and who's using SMART goals or who has this more linear approach of saying, this is where I want to get, and I'm going to work really hard and get there, and who's wondering, how can I have a more experimental approach? I would encourage you to ask yourself, what is something I can do that's a little bit different from what I've been doing so far that I can change, that I can do differently, and where I can let go of the outcome? So I'm going to give you a couple of examples because that's kind of helpful to imagine what that looks like. So a linear goal would be, I want to lose— I'm thinking in kilos, I'm sorry, I live in Europe, but I want to lose 5 kilos. That would be a linear goal. A tiny experiment would be, I will meal prep healthy meals every Sunday for the next 6 weeks. You just do that and then you see what happens, but you're not fixed, like having this fixed outcome in mind. Um, in terms of creative projects, let's say you want to start a newsletter. A linear goal would be, I want to get to 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year. A tiny experiment would be, I'm going to publish a weekly newsletter until the end of the year, and I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to learn from the experience, but again, no fixed outcome, no binary definition of success and failure.

So it's really shifting the focus from outcome to process and falling in love with the process because there's so many lessons to be learned along the way.

Absolutely. And, uh, it removes a lot of the paralysis and the overthinking that a lot of us face before we get started with something ambitious when we don't really know what that's going to look like. There's a lot of uncertainty again. And, uh, we have been taught in our society to look like we know what we're doing. And so very often we avoid trying new things because we might look like a fool if we made a mistake and if it doesn't work out the way we wanted it to. When you shift your mindset and you say, this is just a tiny experiment, then it changes everything. It really changes your relationship to the project, to that ambition itself. Because again, your ambition here is just to learn something new.

Well, you brought up a key point that a lot of us in facing that uncertainty feel fear around even getting started, and that getting started, even in a tiny experiment, can be the most difficult part. So what can we do to actually ensure that we get started on our experiment?

I mean, this is why my book is called Tiny Experiments. I really encourage anyone who wants to experiment more to start Tiny, go with something really small. There is a phenomenon that I call the maximized brain, which is our tendency to always want to go for the biggest, most ambitious version of a project. And, uh, I would really encourage you to always go, when you're hesitating in between two types of experiments, always go for the smaller version. So if there's something that you want to try for 6 months or 3 months, go for 3 months. If you're hesitating between 3 months and 1 month, go for 1 month. So always start small. The second advice I would give is to only start experiments that you're able to conduct with your current resources. It's very easy to say, oh, I wish I could try this, but I don't have the right tools, or I need more money, or I don't have the right network, the right connections, and then you don't do it. So only design experiments that you can actually start right now so you don't have this those excuses to not get started.

Yeah, I know for myself even those excuses can be that, that crutch that allows us to put it off, procrastinate, do it later instead of just getting started. And what's counterintuitive, I think, for a lot of our listeners is they've bought into this mindset that they need to find their purpose, and they oftentimes link their purpose to those SMART goals and these large outcomes that they think will be at the end of that rainbow of like, okay, if I have this career endpoint or this huge promotion, my purpose is tied to it. And then of course, the failure that goes along with that can really set us off course. So what's your advice for those who are trapped in that idea of like finding their purpose before they design experiments or even set goals?

Oh, I'm so glad you're asking this. This is hard, right? Because our entire society is designed around this idea that we need to find our purpose. Open any kind of magazine, scroll on social media, watch TV, listen to a podcast, and Everybody is saying you need to find your purpose, but the reality is if you go and ask people who have found their purpose, so if you go and talk to a successful entrepreneur, a writer, an artist, a creator, or a manager or leader, and you ask them, hey, you look excited when it comes to the work you do. How did you find your purpose? And if they answer this question truthfully, fully, if they don't create a nice narrative around it, if they give you the real answer, all of them will tell you, you know what, it was pretty messy. I had no idea where I was going. And I tried something new. I worked on a project and then someone contacted me and said, hey, do you want to collaborate on this? And I said, yeah, why not? And then I opened this door, had a look, didn't like what I saw here, tried something different, experimented with this, made a lot of mistakes. And one morning I woke up and I felt like, huh, I really like what I'm doing right now. I could see myself keep on doing this for a little bit longer, maybe not the rest of my life, but right now I'm really excited to work on what I'm working on. And this is the reality of figuring out what your purpose is. It's just exploring and experimenting. And I think If more people were being honest about how that process happens, a lot fewer people would be miserable feeling like something is wrong with them because they haven't found their purpose yet. A lot of people feel like if they haven't found their purpose, then their life doesn't have meaning. They wonder why all of these people have their purpose and I haven't found it yet. If we were all being a little bit more honest about the process, I think we could enjoy the journey a lot more.

Well, I think a big part that's difficult for people to see is that the only thing that gets talked about or celebrated is the results and not the messy part of the experiment where you don't get the results you were looking for. You get some data that maybe that's not your purpose, so you change direction and design a new experiment. And coming from a science background myself, so many of my experiments in the lab failed, but in that failure, there was valuable lessons to reorient around how to design the next experiment. So for those of us who maybe haven't really worked in an experimental setting or haven't designed experiments in the past, what's the best way to get started designing that first tiny experiment? Like, what do we need? What are the essential elements for our listeners to get started?

Think about an experiment just like a scientist. So when a scientist designs an experiment, they only need two things. And obviously in the, the real world and in the lab, they need a bunch of things like funding and all of that, but let's just boil it down to the elements. They need to know first, what they're going to test. And second, the number of trials. That's really all you need in order to design a protocol. And so if you translate that to your own life, your own work, you need to know what action you're going to experiment with, and for what duration. And that's it. I call this a PACT because it's a commitment to experiment. You're going to try something new for a specific duration. And what's really important about those two ingredients is first that you need to commit to the duration in advance. So a scientist doesn't start an experiment for a number of trials and then in the middle feels like, don't like what I'm seeing here, just going to stop the experiment. They don't really do that. They commit to the number of trials, they conduct the experiment, and only at the end they decide what they're going to do with the data, how they're going to analyze it, and what they're going to do afterwards. So that's number one, is commit to the duration in advance and stick to it. Number two is withhold judgment until you're done. So very similarly, you're not going to start poking at the data in the middle. You collect all of your data and then only you look at it. So decide on the duration in advance and then withhold judgment until the end. An action and a duration. That's your pact.

I think the most important aspect of that is to make those decisions when you're at your default, when you're thinking clearly, because once you've started the experiment, now you're invested, your emotions are now engaged. Those emotions might deter you from stopping the experiment, changing the experiment. So that's why it's important to set all of that before you get started. Don't allow your emotions to, uh, you know, to destroy all the work or to not let you get the, the data that you need.

Yeah, I love that you're saying that. And this is why scientists write the protocol in advance. And ideally, if you can, this is completely optional, but you might even consider showing your mini protocol to someone and just say, hey, does it make sense? Make that extra commitment and say, that's the experiment I'm going to run. So having this additional accountability so you don't change the parameters in the middle, you don't stop the experiment in the middle, you don't start analyzing the data in the middle when the, your emotions are high. A lot of, uh, interesting experiments only yield interesting results after a little while. So for example, I did an experiment with meditation last year. I had noticed that I, I basically heard myself say, I'm so bad at meditation. This is not for me. And when I noticed that I have a fixed mindset like this, usually this is a good source of inspiration, a good trigger for a tiny experiment. So I said, let me run a tiny experiment here. I'm going to meditate every morning for 15 days. If I hadn't committed to that duration in advance, and if I hadn't committed to not, like, to withholding judgment until the end, I probably would've stopped after 2 or 3 days. It was so uncomfortable. I didn't like it. And I'm so glad that I stick to the experiment until the end because it's only towards getting closer to the 15 days that I really started seeing some positive effects. And so, there's very often a messy middle. And that's why, as you said, designing your protocol when you're very clear about what you want to learn here, and then just following the protocol, trusting that you will learn something new. This is really the power of having an experimental mindset.

Yeah, there's lots of things that are at stake. I mean, if you're the test subject, you're going to have a lot of emotions going on. If you've bet or have staked a claim that something was going to happen in an experiment and you're running it again, your ego is now tied up into it. So it is very important to understand what parts of you are invested and how they can skew those results if not.

Yeah, you're touching upon another important aspect aspect, which is accepting the result, whatever it is. And so when you start your experiment, you might have a hypothesis. You might feel like, I think this is going to work. I have an intuition that this is going to work. If it turns out that you were wrong and that did not work, or that you got unexpected results. And again, the idea here is to respond to that like a scientist. And instead of saying, oh, I'm such a failure, what did I do wrong? To say, huh, that's interesting. What can we—

and inform the next experiment. So when I was in the lab doing cancer research, sometimes based on the protocol we design, we didn't have enough of the chemical in the experiment to actually show an effect. So after getting the results, looking at the end, we'd go, okay, let's design the next protocol to have double the dose. And that might be the same thing in your personal development. Like maybe 5 minutes of meditation wasn't enough. But if you started to feel like, hey, this is something I could do, maybe doubling the dose to 10 minutes for 15 days could get you that desired effect and outcome. And I think it— from the scientific, the scientist mindset point of view, I think it's really important to understand that these tiny experiments, they work because there's consistency in the protocol. So it's doing it day in and day out. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about the compounding effect in finance and, and what it can do to our investments, but we don't often think about what that tiny compounding effect can have in our personal development. And we even challenge our coaching clients around just tiny wins and doing it consistently by showing up consistently and having that conversation with someone new each and every day. By the end of 30 days, you'll have talked to 30 more people and all of a sudden you're gonna find yourself having better conversations with ease. It's gonna feel effortless, but in the beginning it can feel like, oh, this isn't enough. Like, Intuitively, we feel like we need to be doing more all the time, and that pressure can often lead to us designing too large of experiments. And I know you talk a lot about how important it is for the consistency to really pay off and why just showing up is enough. How's that shown up for you in these experiments that you've been designing personally?

You need consistent action and you also need consistent reflection. I think if you have those two things, then you're going to grow. And you might not know what that will look like. There's no linear path in front of you. There's no blueprint. But if you constantly show up, consistently show up, do the action, and then observe what worked and what didn't and keep on iterating, you are going to grow. And so in terms of how that has worked for me, I have applied those tiny experiments in so many areas of my life. My business, NEST Labs, started as a tiny experiment. I decided to start writing online. And so I created, I designed a tiny experiment that said, I'm going to write one article every weekday for the next 100 weekdays. And, uh, I know this doesn't sound like a tiny experiment, 100 weekdays, but it's because I don't think everybody would agree with my definition of what counts as an article. Some of them were very, very short, like a couple of paragraphs. It didn't matter as long as I showed up and I wrote something and I published it. And this was really amazing for me in terms of growth. First, because of the topics I was writing about, which was neuroscience when I was studying for my master's degree at the time. So I was learning and going deeper when it came to those topics. But also as someone, um, you can probably hear from my accent, English is not my first language. So, getting out of my comfort zone and every day showing up and writing in English about a topic that was new for me. And every day paying attention to the feedback I was getting from people, to the response I was getting, and keeping on tweaking and iterating. And that became my newsletter. That became a business. That became what opened so many doors to so many opportunities that then became a book. And, um, this really shows that there's no way to predict what doors a tiny experiment is going to open in the future. The idea is really to start with something small that you can do right now, to keep on reflecting on the action and what you're learning, keep on tweaking, keep on improving in small ways, not necessarily doing a big overhaul of your entire life and work, and trusting that if you keep on doing that, if you keep on showing up, you are going to grow in ways that you cannot imagine We often don't think about all the other ways we could grow.

Obviously you grew as a writer, but then you grew an audience. You built relationships off of that. You know, so much of these little tiny experiments in the design, I know we have it tied to some outcome that we want. I wanna meditate more. I wanna talk to more people. I wanna have better relationships. But oftentimes we don't think about all the other impacts that just that tiny action consistently will have on our lives.

Especially if you start applying this mindset Everywhere. Um, you can apply tiny experiments to the way you manage your health. For example, you can say, for example, I, I will not bring my phone in the bedroom with me, uh, for 2 weeks, or I will make my own lunch every day for a month, or I will go to the gym 3 times a week for X number of weeks. So you can do that with your health. You can do that with your relationships. I've had people in the NestLabs community, one person said, for example, that he noticed that because he was so busy with his business, he was losing touch with some of his friends. So he designed an experiment where he said, every week I'm going to send one voice note to a friend that I haven't talked to in a while. I've seen people use it for networking saying, every Monday I'm going to reach out to one new expert on LinkedIn, someone I admire. I heard something about them in a podcast or I read their book. I'm just going to send a message. You can experiment with doing one fun date with your partner every Friday night. So you can literally experiment with anything. And what's nice is that it's not like a habit. Like when you think about creating new habits, something I find absolutely crazy is that a lot of us have done that. We commit for a new habit for the rest of our lives. We commit to a new habit for the rest of our lives. Without having ever tried it before. And then we wonder why it's not working. So tiny experiments can also be a gateway to discover habits that you might want to implement then later on in life.

Going along with that, so many of us will view procrastination as failure and because of it then beat ourselves up and not wanna design any of these experiments. And actually you say we should treat that like a signal and we should actually think about procrastination as, as something that we can use in the design of these experiments. Can you elaborate?

I talk a lot about in my work about systematic curiosity, which means being curious about absolutely everything, even the stuff that's uncomfortable and that we'd rather not look at too closely. And I use procrastination as an example because I find procrastination fascinating. It's something we all do. We all do it, and we're all very happy to talk about it at a conceptual level. So we say, oh yeah, procrastination. Yeah, I know, I know. But still, there's still so much shame and taboo around it in the sense that nobody ever walks to their boss at work and says, I'm sorry, I haven't finished this presentation because I was procrastinating. Nobody does that. We never admit to procrastinating. And so what would it look like to be curious about this psychological phenomenon that apparently we're all trying to ignore is happening? It's happening in general, but it's not happening to us. And so I created this little tool that's very simple and that allows you to have almost like a conversation with your procrastination, because that's what your procrastination is. Your procrastination is just a signal from your brain. Trying to tell you that something is not quite working right now. So instead of trying to push through using your willpower and discipline and blaming yourself for procrastinating, what would it look like to just have this conversation and say, hi procrastination, you're back. Hello. What are you trying to tell me? So the little tool I created is called the triple check. And, uh, the idea is to ask, where are you coming from? Where is this procrastination coming from? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the procrastination is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced you should be working on this task in the first place. So it might not be conscious, but deep down, you know that it makes no sense for you to work on this. You're wasting your time. And it might be that this is a task that someone gave you a long time ago that's outdated now. It might be that the task makes makes no sense, is not aligned with your priorities. It might be that someone else should do the task, but rationally speaking, you should not be doing this. Then if the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't feel like this task is going to be fun. It's not going to be enjoyable. It's not exciting. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, so maybe rationally speaking, you're convinced you should be working on this, Emotionally speaking, you feel like this looks like fun, but practically speaking, you believe that you don't have the right tools, the right resources, the right support network in order to complete the task. And, uh, what's great is that when you start systematically being curious like this about any kind of challenge or resistance that you're facing, you can also be systematic in the way you find solutions. So, if the problem is coming from the head, you can go back to the drawing board, either on your own or with your team, if you're working with your team, and you can say, "Hey, I've been procrastinating on this because I'm not fully convinced that it makes sense. Can we talk about it? Can we brainstorm? Can we figure out a better approach?" If the problem is coming from the heart, then you can make it fun. Grab your favorite colleague to go and do a little coworking session. Go to a coffee shop that you like, give yourself a little reward. And if the problem is coming from the hand, then raise that hand, ask for help, get someone to coach you or mentor you, or watch a tutorial or get a course or get the help that you need in order to do the task instead of feeling stuck.

When you ask yourself those questions of why am I procrastinating? You're going to come up with a few answers, but what's interesting is usually the answer that you find is the reason you procrastinate because of everything else as well. So you figured out a way to rationalize it or hide it from yourself. So you don't have to do the things you need to, but it's obscured enough so you don't see for the reason why you're procrastinating and get over the hurdle. For instance, a while ago I had learned that when things are novel to me, that I procrastinate because I have to do something new for the first time, which probably means I'm going to make a mess, which is probably I'm going to get upset with myself. I'm going to get mad. I'm going to beat myself up. But once I learned that and realized, oh, well, it's because I'm walking into a black box, I'm walking into doing something new for the first time. And I easily combated that by letting myself know, I'm doing this for the first time. I'm going to do it terribly. And that's okay. So let me go make a mess. And, and, and having that understanding of what the procrastinating, uh, was and the right tool to get me over that hurdle, then I never had that procrastination ever again because it was always the same one.

I love that. And, uh, yeah, you're really describing the, the hand one here where a lot of people, if they don't feel like they know exactly how to do it, uh, they're never going to, going to start because again, there's this fear of not doing it correct, of, uh, making mistakes, looking like a fool. And you touch upon another point, which I think is amazing, is that once you've had that conversation enough times, sometimes one time is enough, but very often, and it's the same for, for me, exactly the same as you, I noticed that it's, I always go back to the same sources of procrastination. And after a while, that conversation takes 2 seconds. I'm just like, oh yeah, I'm doing the thing again. And, and it's just a lot easier and you get unstuck a lot faster.

Yeah. It's also something that we work with our clients with in the X-Factor Accelerator, listening to them talk and understanding how they uncover their own procrastinated, procrastinations and hurdles with whatever cognitive distortions they have roped together to make it palatable to them. But soon as we figured it out, I could always bring that up. Is that the way you're seeing it? Or is it this pattern, this unhealthy pattern that we've uncovered that has been in front of you for everything so far in the program? You got me. Yes, it is. But as you said, once we've had that conversation, once that's identified and I pull it out a few times, they begin to catch themselves in it. And so the learning curve is expedited when that happens. And that's why we have so much fun.

I'm smiling and nodding while listening to you because it's, it's actually funny how good we are at telling ourselves stories.

Oh yeah.

We're amazing storytellers. And, uh, and I think that we're really good at telling, telling ourselves stories, uh, whatever. To make it a little bit more comfortable and whatever lies are needed for us to not necessarily look at what is actually happening.

I'd love to hear your response to those in our audience who are like, okay, I like the concept, but the idea of tiny, I want big wins. We talked earlier about that career ladder that everyone thinks they're climbing and, and wants to climb it faster. And this concept of a tiny experiment feels like, well, now I'm just slowing myself down.

We just talked about stories, right? I think there's a very dangerous, toxic narrative in the media of the overnight success. And I think this is what is perpetuating this idea that you need to have this very big ambition and you need to go for that big goal and anything less like than that is laziness. And, uh, this is very unfortunate, I think, because anything that is worth pursuing is going to take quite a few iterations. That's just the reality of it. There's nobody that woke up and went from zero to a thousand without actually trying different versions of a project and making a lot of mistakes, failing, learning from them. To me, Tiny Experiments is just a more structured way to to do this. It's just a method to make it a little easier to go through that experimental phase that is absolutely necessary in order to grow. I don't think there's any way to bypass it. And yes, of course there are exceptions and there are people who were maybe born with rich parents or got really lucky, got noticed by someone and became an overnight success. It does happen, but I don't think you should necessarily design your life based on kind of wishing that maybe you're going to get really, really lucky. And, uh, if instead you design your life around very simple systems where you show up, you let go of the outcome, you just do your best, and you promise to yourself, you really commit to learning from your experiences, to try to be as honest as possible. As we were just talking about uncovering your narrative, those, uh, those, uh, false narratives that we create around our path and our behaviors and our emotions. I think if you really commit to that consistency, that self-awareness, you are going to be successful a lot more than someone who keeps on trying to figure out what is the, the big thing that they should go after.

In our coaching, we really preach momentum and the impact that it has on your growth and development. And I think what's wrong with the latter is a lot of it is just waiting for opportunity. We think that next opportunity, I have to wait for that promotion. I have to wait to, to get to the next rung in the ladder. When in actuality, doing tiny experiments can create what you call growth loops and can accelerate things, creating momentum that leads to the next experiment and even faster growth than you realized versus this visualization of a ladder that I have to wait until I can reach the next rung or the next rung is handed to me. So how do growth loops and this concept of like stacking these experiments really create that momentum and speed things up for us?

The idea of growth groups is, again, we talked about action and reflection. And so when you pair action and reflection together, you get a growth group. A growth group is the idea that every time you complete an experiment, you take the time to reflect on what worked, what didn't, and what you're going to use from what you learned for your next iteration. And, uh, in the book I share a very simple tool for this, which I call plus minus next. And, uh, the idea is that you draw 3 columns. You can do that in a notebook, or if you use a digital note-taking app, you can just do 3 columns or 3 bullet points. And the first one is plus, where you write everything that went well. The second one, minus, is everything that didn't go so well, and the last One next is what you're going to tweak, what you're going to try next, what you're going to focus on next. The idea here is that you first acknowledge what went well. So a little bit of celebration for your wins, which is really important in order to maintain momentum, but you have the honesty of acknowledging what didn't go so well, what could have been better. So this is really, again, this self-awareness that is so important. If you only had the plus and the minus, then it would be static. It would just be observing what happened and you would actually go in circles if you kept on repeating the same thing over and over again without ever iterating, tweaking, and adapting. And this is what the next part is about. The next part is about extracting knowledge from plus and minus, from what went well and what didn't go so well. And again, with this idea of forward momentum saying, okay, So this is what worked, this is what didn't work so well. What do I want more of? What do I want less of? And how am I going to adapt my approach? What small tweaks am I going to implement in my next iteration? And when you do that, you really ensure that you're not just going in circles, but that you're growing. You create those growth loops.

What I love about that is reflection can often feel challenging. Like overwhelming. How am I gonna reflect on all this information? And you made it so actionable with a 3-column exercise that anyone can do in their journal, their digital journal, that allows them to keep moving forward. I know for myself, when I was doing cancer research, I'd go to a multimillion-dollar building. I'd scrub in to go into a special room that's even more expensive with immunocompromised animals. And the experiment itself was in an enclosed situation where science was spending a lot of money doing ensure that experiment completed. But life doesn't always work that way. Sometimes our tiny experiments lead to challenges where we get laid off or we have something happen to us where we can't finish the experiment. What's your recommendation in those moments where unfortunately the experiment didn't get to complete?

I always tell people, do you have 3 options, uh, when it comes to an experiment? The first one, uh, is to persist, which is just to keep going exactly as you were going, which I know is not an option that seems obvious because a lot of people think that if something is working, you need to scale it up, go bigger, go more ambitious. But this is an option. You can just keep going with your experiment if it's working the way it's working. The other option is to pivot, which is you're going to change something and you're going to maybe make it a bit smaller, a bit bigger. And the last one is to pause it. And I intentionally call it pause and not quit or abandon, because you can actually shelf an experiment for a period of time whenever your current situation doesn't make it really possible for you to keep on going. And, uh, that doesn't mean you're never going to try that experiment ever again. Just means that right now is not the right moment. And so I would recommend it for anyone who finds themselves in that situation. One of those two last option. So either tweak the, the experiment a little bit so it becomes more feasible with your new circumstances, or pause it. And that's really okay. Um, again, that only works if you have this honest conversation with yourself, this self-awareness of saying, those are the reasons why I need to either pivot or pause the experiment. And whenever my, my situation changes again, I will revisit and I will decide whether I keep going with a similar pact or whether I need to change it.

It sounds good in theory, but sometimes those emotions get in the way and we need just a, a reset. You know, how do we turn those setbacks into opportunities if we've had to go through that reset moment?

Those are actually amazing moments for experimentation. Um, those liminal moments. So liminal is a word I actually only discovered a couple of years ago, and now I love it. So I'm just going to explain what it means in case other people have never heard it before either. So liminal means, it comes from the Latin limen, and that means, uh, thresholds. That means in between. That means transition. That means being on the doorstep of something. And liminal moments come with a lot of uncertainty. So we're, we're not where we used to be anymore, but we're not in that new place yet. So maybe, um, yeah, we were just let go of our job, but we haven't found a new job yet. It can be happier moments. Maybe we just got engaged, but we're not married yet. Maybe we just learned that we're pregnant, but the baby's not here yet. And there are all of these in-betweens where where our, our sense of identity, it becomes blurry. We don't have clear next steps. We're not quite sure what we want. We're feeling a little bit lost. The instinct that most people have in those liminal spaces is to try and cross them as quickly as possible, get back to shore, get back to safety. And this is why, for example, you might go and accept the first job offer that you get. Or you might decide to go to the first university that accepts your application, or you, and you go for the most obvious, safest option because you, you want to get back again to safety. If you can, I would highly, highly encourage you to look at those liminal spaces as spaces that are fertile for growth and for self-discovery. Because you don't have clear rules, because you don't have a clear path, because you don't have a clear blueprint. Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty and fear and anxiety, but there's also an opportunity to try different things, to experiment, to see if you might want to change things in the way you're approaching your life or the path that you're currently taking. And so I would say that the first step is to acknowledge and accept that it is completely normal to feel those emotions in those moments, in those transitional spaces. So if you're scared, if you're feeling anxiety, if all you want is to get back to safety, that's completely normal. It's just your brain trying to protect you and it's your survival mode kicking in, completely normal. Second, trying to now let your prefrontal cortex kick in and take over and, uh, and, and kind of like, you know, say, okay, I know why I'm, why I'm feeling this, but I actually want to explore. I want to be curious. I want to take a little risk here. I want to experiment. What would that look like? And again, it doesn't have to be big. What's a small thing I could try in that space that could be generative and that could allow me to discover something new, Maybe about myself, about my work, or about the world.

When you really think to the pivots in your life, they largely come from those moments where there's just so much uncertainty that you're able to try something completely new and, and not hold so much of an outcome around it. And that exploration of that moment of exploration creates the new pathway that allows you to find that purpose or find the meaning in your life that you're looking for. Um, but in the moment. I know how hard it is emotionally with that massive amount of uncertainty that you're feeling to take that action.

You know, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I think those moments are so difficult that there's also the temptation, which we all do, to— when we're on the other side, once we've experimented and we figured out something new that we wanted to do and we're kind of back to a sense of safety and people ask us, how did you get there? We tend to give them a very simplified narrative of how we got there. We kind of gloss over the fact that there was a lot of messiness. We were lost. We tried new things and we weren't sure where we were going. And, um, and I would really like it. I think it would be amazing and the world would be a better place if everybody was a little bit more transparent about the messiness of the process. It's great to have methods and frameworks, and obviously you come from a scientific background and me as well. And so we, we do like to have those protocols and, and that for me, they offer some scaffolding, but they're never going to completely remove the inherent messiness of figuring out what you want to do with your life.

One thing that I think helps with the messiness is to go through it with other people who are in the messiness, and we see this transformation in our coaching clients all the time. You know, a lot of times we might be growth-minded, but we're in a community of people who are fixed-minded. We're like, don't work on your social skills, or don't take up meditation, didn't work for me. And we can feel like, oh, we're reverting to this fixed mindset. And yet you talk about social flow, and we see it when clients join the program and they're surrounded by other people with curiosity doing these tiny experiments together, reporting their results back each and every week. Just how much growth happens and how that curiosity just expands across the whole group. And oftentimes we might feel that, oh, I can't share that with others, or they're not working on these things and they don't care about it. But actually, if you, you just share what you're curious about with more people, you're gonna find that social flow. I'd love for you to unpack how social flow really can create such opportunity with these tiny experiments.

I think most people at this stage are familiar with flow state. So when you really, you lose yourself in the moment in your work, you lose track of time and you really feel this sense of heightened focus and creativity. Most of the research on flow has been done on individuals, but there's recent research that shows that when you surround yourself with other people who are deeply curious, engrossed in an activity, going really, really deep and trying to understand something, You're also going to get into a state of flow, uh, more easily. So being surrounded with people who are highly curious and who are really focused on something while you also try to tackle a challenge is going to help you get into that flow state more easily. And, um, that says a lot around about your, your community and your environment and the impact that it can have on your success. What's interesting is that not only that is going to help you be more successful over the long term because you are going to experiment more, you're going to be more comfortable making mistakes and learning from them and sharing what you learned and learning together, but it's also going to make the journey more enjoyable. And that's very important too, because sure, you want to be successful, but, uh, why not make the journey enjoyable also?

A lot of times it can be intimidating when you're just getting started to, to join a community where you feel like they're more advanced or they've been working these experiments longer. Maybe they're a better runner or they've been meditating longer. But actually what I found is really interesting is those are the moments where like the community support really comes into play. Like the welcoming of that person who's just getting started, who's doing their first experiment. Uh, you don't have to be advanced and you don't have to be someone who's been doing this for years. Years to join a community that is working on these same areas and then feel that flow just entering that state. And that's why you see it at gyms welcoming new members. That flow is present even if you're intimidated and you're doing it for the first time.

There's the added benefit for people who are a little bit more advanced. As a beginner, you don't think about that. You might think, oh, I just joined, I'm a bit of a burden, I don't know what I'm doing. But what you don't realize and you don't think about is that people who are a little bit more advanced than you, even just a couple of steps more advanced than you, benefit a lot from teaching you. And so when you have a community like that, a peer learning community, as you said, it can be the gym, it can be any kind of community of practice, everybody benefits. It's not just when in the linear model with the ladder, there's really this idea that knowledge only flows one way. And you're just supposed to learn from people who are more senior than you. In this growth loop model with the social flow as part of the community where everybody is learning from each other, knowledge is flowing in all directions. Everybody's learning from each other, and even the more advanced people are learning from the beginners.

Now, one thing that we really appreciate about you is, is you do show the messy middle, and you've built a brand around building in public and, and talking about your experiments in public, which I think can be very intimidating for a lot of people who are afraid of showing the messy middle. What helped you push past that fear of showing the messy middle publicly and actually build a brand around it?

I did have to start small. So for me, although writing in English was uncomfortable at the beginning, it was still writing. It was just me in front of my computer. I had as much time as I wanted in order to be able to Rewrite and correct my mistakes as much as possible. Once I started feeling a little bit more comfortable with that, I started experimenting with other mediums. And so I started recording videos. I was very uncomfortable doing this. So again, I started small. Once I was a bit more comfortable doing this, I started experimenting with giving talks. And again, this is something I've talked about a lot with my, my my community and my audience, but I used to be absolutely terrified of public speaking. I used to have nightmares for weeks before I had to give a talk. I had stomach cramps and it was absolutely horrible. And so again, I had to experiment. I had to really find different ways to manage my anxiety, to become more comfortable and really to find my voice. And so every time I start feeling comfortable enough as part of, uh, uh, uh, kind of a part of my personal lab where I'm experimenting with lots of different things. I try and ask myself, what is another area of growth that I would like to experiment with? And so I didn't go from waking up one, from zero to now speaking in front of audiences of thousands of people. I literally started with just recording myself, uh, in front of my computer and uploading short videos online. And then giving online workshops and then in person, et cetera, et cetera. So I've been learning in public for years, but it's been a very iterative process where I started small and, uh, I kept on expanding my, my zone of experimentation.

I'd love to just hear what are a few tiny experiments that really like surprised you or just lit you up knowing that readers of the book and your followers and your community members are putting this into action in their own lives?

I'll share my favorite, uh, from the past 6 months, which, uh, I love, which was really surprising to me because it shows that sometimes it really doesn't have to be about taking a big action. So someone in my community is an artist, painter, has a home studio, and, uh, she had a major surgery that meant that she couldn't paint for quite a few months. And she developed anxiety around starting painting again. She felt like she kind of had lost her creative flow. She had been not completely, not touching any paintbrushes, not being able to do anything. She designed a tiny experiment where she said, for the next 2 weeks, I'm just going to go and sit in my studio. And that's it. For 1 hour, I think she said. I'm going to sit in my studio for 1 hour for the next 2 weeks. And I don't have to paint. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to force myself to do anything. I just have to go and sit and do that. And by the end of the 2 weeks, she was painting again, not because she forced herself to paint, not because she blamed herself or tried to find solutions or tried to change the outcome, but because she took a very gentle approach and she started with a very, very tiny experiment of just showing up and putting herself in that environment that would make her feel a little bit more comfortable restarting painting again. So it's one of my favorite examples in the community from the past few months because again, people would say, what, just going and sitting in your studio? How is that? How is that doing anything? But obviously it was doing something since she's painting again.

People don't give our emotions credit they deserve for being as powerful as they are and, and just how they affect us and everything that we do. And, uh, yeah, even sitting in that studio for just a bit every day, uh, it's doing so much. You're, it's exposure. You're getting acclimated to things. You're, you're getting creative juices flowing again. You're putting yourself back in your realm. All of those things lend itself to slowly work into where we need to be.

Exactly. It's, uh, and again, it's really about removing the self-blame and the self-judgment out of the equation and, uh, and just asking and being curious instead and saying, hmm, that might help. Let's give it a try. It's just a tiny experiment.

People need to give themselves the credit they deserve as well. I know for myself, when I've done the Tiny Experiments thing in the past, and I'm producing just to produce, right? So like, I'm going to do this thing today, and I'm going to turn in something at noon, and it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's something. And because I'm doing this for the first time, it's probably going to be terrible. It's probably going to be bad. It's it's going to be a mess, but hey, it's going— I will turn in something at the end of the day. But every time that I've done that, I've caught myself then going back, trying to make it better, not wanting to turn in something terrible, but giving it a little bit of extra love, seeing how I can straighten it up. So it's that engagement and just taking action. And then, you know, let your own ethics and, and, uh, self-determination take it the rest of the way.

I love that. I love how saying, I'm just going to write something by the deadline, it gets you started. This is the hardest part, just getting started.

Yes, that's all you need.

And then you care enough, you actually care enough about the work to get it to a place where it will be good. You just need to get started.

Well, thank you so much for sharing Tiny Experiments with us today. I'd love for our audience to get started joining your community. Where can they find out more?

They can go to nestlabs.com. I have a newsletter that I send every week, and, uh, the book is available anywhere books are sold.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.