When Success Creates Self-Doubt: How Leaders Move Through "Wonderhell"

What happens when you reach the next level of success and instead of pure confidence, doubt quietly creeps in? That uneasy mix of achievement and uncertainty is exactly what my next guest calls wonder hell. I'm Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week, we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life. My guest today is Laura Gassner Otting, who teaches people to become limitless. Her secret superpower is seeing your greatness and reflecting it back on you so you can get free of yourself and achieve extraordinary results. She's a regular contributor to the Good Morning America show, the Today Show, Harvard Business Review, and Oprah Daily. She's the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 3 books, Wonderhell, Limitless, and Mission Driven. She served as presidential appointee in Bill Clinton's White House helped shape AmeriCorps, and she founded and ran and sold her own global search firm. Laura, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.

I'm so excited. I know we've been trying to get this to happen for a while, so thank you for having me.

Absolutely. So I love your perspective. Maybe we'll start a little bit about your book, Wonderhell, because I love the perspective of— I've often seen people— there's lots of books about how to become successful, and you're writing from the other side of like, and what happens to you when you are successful at something or you're given an opportunity that you haven't had before, and what are the emotions and the mindsets and all the things that come into play then? And so your book, Wonderhell, talks about this. Perhaps you can share a little bit more. What did you mean by the term Wonderhell?

So Wonderhell is this moment where the burden of your potential walks into your psyche and says, hey, man, like, what you got for me, huh? What are you going to do with this newfound potential you didn't even realize you had last year, last month, last week? And it happens to all of us. We're in this moment where we achieve something we didn't think we could do, whether it's running a race, whether it's starting a business, whether it's landing a deal, whether it's like, you know, wooing the girl. Like, whatever the thing is, we reach this moment where like, that was amazing. It was humbling. It was exciting. It was wonderful. The work I did opened more doors than I ever thought possible. And yet inside of those doors, we see a version of ourselves that we never thought possible. And suddenly we're like, ooh, like maybe I want more. And so it's exciting and amazing and humbling and wonderful, but it also introduces us to self-doubt and uncertainty and anxiety and vulnerability and stress and imposter syndrome and all these emotions. So it's kind of hell, right? Because you're stuck with this burden. You go like, well, now that I know I maybe I can achieve it, But if I don't, I'm stuck with that inconvenient truth that there's more inside of me, and I'm not sure what to do with it. So it's wonderful and it's hell. It's kind of wonder hell.

Yeah. Yeah. It's always this feeling like, I saw this potential myself. Now I'm living up to my potential. But what if I can't keep it? What if I can't stay here?

Yes. Or—

and all those— what if they found out that maybe I'm not quite up to par that everyone now thinks I am because I've accomplished something?

Yes, like, this is the moment. Like, now that I've achieved something, I have to go for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So like, I ran the first mile of my entire life when I turned 39 years old. Like, I had never run. I had used every single excuse to get out of gym class. It took me 6 weeks to run that mile without stopping and like literally barfing. And then once I ran that mile, I turned to the person next to me and I was like, you know, if we string 3 of those together, we can do a 5K. So we signed up for a 5K because we were like all hopped up in endorphins. And then it took us 6 weeks to train to do the 5K. And at the end of the 5K, we We're like, you know, if we string 2 of those together, we can do a 10K. And at the end of the 10K, we were like, you know, and then we signed up for a half marathon. And I live in Boston, right? So you know where this is going. I ended up running the Boston Marathon. I'm now training for my 9th marathon, not because I love running, but because at the end of each one, you're like, well, I wonder what else I could do. I wonder what else I could be. I wonder who I can embody and what I can become if only I listen to that voice inside my head. And so For me, I'm really fascinated about what we do in this moment when we realize that there's more inside of us. And I think every leader, every entrepreneur has gone to this point where they have either launched their own business and been like, well, a client hired me for something. I sold a product. Maybe I could sell more. Maybe I could go to another market. Wait, if I go to another market, is that the moment where people realize that I'm a fraud? If I get promoted to the next position and I have to give a bigger presentation, is that the day that I yard sale in front of everybody? Like, we're always in this moment where we're excited about our potential, but also uncertain whether we have one toe over the edge of incompetence or nine toes over the edge of incompetence, right? And it's in that space that we really learn who we are and what we want. But what happens, and this is the issue, is that we're also told what we want in that moment. Bigger, better, faster, more. Like, you should keep achieving and keep going and keep growing. And sometimes we don't want to. Sometimes we're in a season of our life where maybe we want to take a step back and, like, be around a little bit more for the kids. Maybe it's time we want to retire. Maybe we want to switch careers. Maybe we want to do something totally totally different. And we're given this external pressure that we should keep doing the next thing just because the next thing is there. And so I'm really fascinated by the space where the burden of our potential is talking to us while we're also balancing these external voices and these external expectations to figure out what we're truly intrinsically motivated to do.

Yeah, absolutely. And when opportunity knocks— I mean, I swear I just had this happen where I was coaching an exec, a C-suite executive who became a C-suite after someone left. And this is at a public company. And and now they're in the C-suite. They were at first really excited, but then there was this burden of, "I don't know that I belong here, and now I'm really exposed, because if I don't do well, what if they fire me now? And if I don't do well, what's going to happen?" And so, so much of the work was dealing with that inner critic and saying not to shrink away from it. Like, there was almost a moment where it was like, "I'm gonna leave so they don't find out that I actually am not sure whether or not I—" belong in here. And fast forward, absolutely belongs there. They saw the potential and is now thriving in that. And if had quit too soon, gosh, all that opportunity would have been lost. So given that opportunity, you talk a lot about, and I love the, in the book you talk about these related to sort of amusement park rides. We know about imposter syndrome, right? What's your take on dealing with imposter syndrome that you call Imposterville?

Yeah, so Wonderhell, I organized it as an amusement park. So there's 3 different towns. There's Impostor Town, Doubtsville, and Burnout City. In my last book, Limitless, I talk about why other people's definitions of success don't fit for us. And it was based on 20 years in executive search and having, you know, I would call the most successful people in the world, and I try to recruit them away on behalf of my clients, right? That was the job as an executive recruiter. You call super successful people and you try to recruit them away. So it sounds like a hard job, but like, I would call really successful people but none of them were that happy. And so they all called me back. And I was so fascinated by this question. And so Limitless is like, here's why you're not happy. Here's what I actually learned allows people to be happy in their work so that they can achieve success and happiness. And then here's how you need to change your career, change your company, change yourself in order to get there. It was like super linear, really easy. But then when I sat down to write Wonderhell, which is all about the swirl of emotions that we may be feeling in this moment when we're introduced to our bigger potential— again, I mentioned vulnerability, imposter syndrome,— doubt, uncertainty, stress, anxiety, burnout, envy, exhaustion, all of it. I didn't really know how to write the book because everybody experiences these emotions at a different moment in time depending on what stage and what age and what phase they're in. And so a woman that I know, an author, Rahaf Harfoush, actually said, you know, it's kind of like an amusement park. Like, you go into an amusement park and some people want to ride the roller coaster first. Some people want to go to the merry-go-round first. So you kind of just need a map that's like, you are here. And so Wonderhell is really created as this amusement park where there's Impostortown, Doubtsville, and Burnout City. And each of the towns has 5 rides, and each of the rides, it evokes an emotion that you may be feeling in this moment. So in Impostortown, I talk about this feeling of realization that there's more inside of you and that you're sort of stuck with this, well, now, you know, what do I do with it? And, and in writing the book, I interviewed 100 different glass ceiling shatters, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, thinkers, creatives, philanthropists, activists, everyday people like you and I and your listeners. And what I learned from them, which fascinating to me is that every single one of them, whether it was conscious or subconscious, every single one of them took imposter syndrome and rather than seeing it as this diagnosis— there's something wrong with me, I don't belong here, I'm not so sure, maybe they're going to figure it out— instead, they wore it as a badge of honor. They congratulated themselves. Look at me in this place I didn't even know I could get to. How awesome is that? In doing that, they changed the voice inside their head from a limitation, you're an imposter, to an invitation, how awesome that you're here. And I gotta tell you, they did it with the simplest tool ever. Like, it's ridiculous. Like, I get paid money to go to events and to give keynotes to teach this tool, and it is bananas easy. They simply changed the way that they said the sentence to themselves. So instead of saying, oh wow, I haven't done this before, They just go, oh wow, I haven't done this before, right? It's so simple. Oh wow. It's the different emphasis. I haven't done this before is, oh no, it's gonna be terrible. I might fail. Everyone's gonna see. It's rife with, you know, embarrassment and failure and, and just, it's gonna be a disaster. Oh wow, I haven't done this before is exciting and it's curious and it, and it invites you to learn and to grow and to get educated and to experiment, to test, to try to learn from your failures, right? It's, it's just they simply changed the way they interpreted imposter syndrome from a limitation to an invitation. And just doing that, frankly, has changed everything for me. Like, I do things now that I've never done before, and I'm like, this is going to be awesome. Like, I haven't done this before. Like, how cool that I get to do something new. And then it works. And how does it work? It works because we expect that it's going to work. And when you expect something's going to work, just like, you know, having a lucky rabbit's foot, just like having like lucky socks that you wear to, you know, the game. If we think things are going to work out well, we do the things that the people do for whom things work out well. Like you try an extra rep, you practice an extra time, you like go back and, you know, proofread your material, you do an extra rep at the gym, whatever the thing is. And just by nature of expecting that things are going to work out, that you're invited to this opportunity, we actually do more work that allows us to succeed in the opportunity. So it like becomes this self-fulfilling, wonderful, virtuous circle. Absolutely. Absolutely.

We talk about that there's two orientations to leadership, right? There's a reactive orientation, which is reacting to something out that creates anxiety, and all you're doing is working to contain the anxiety. So the effort you're putting in is about containing anxiety. Well, that's not a structure that works over time. When we say results over time, it's an oscillating structure because it depends on anxiety to motivate you to try to contain it. Whereas the switch that you're talking about is creative leadership, which is I get connected to something I'm passionate about, and I have the vision of what could be possible. And that's an energy unleashing cycle. It is.

And, and I fully opt to the idea that this sounds super woo-woo and like, oh, she's just a motivational speaker, that's a bunch of nonsense, you can do it. But I'm also a doctoral student. I started my, my doctorate because, you know, I want to be in wonder hell all the time too. So why not go back to school at 55 and get your doctorate? So, um, there's actual psychological science behind it. So there's— I now understand, like, I wrote Wonderhell, and you want to talk about evolving as a leader. I wrote Wonderhell, and I was like, I know what I know, and I know that it is right. I wrote Wonderhell. I wrote Limitless. And I know that they're right because I spent 30 years thinking about it. And I spent 20 years advising leaders from the corner office to the Oval Office about leadership, about talent, about potential. Like, I know what I know, and I know that it's right. I just I just don't know why it's right. And I think a lot of leaders have that, right? A lot of entrepreneurs have that. We have this instinct that's like, I, I know, I know it when I see it, I know it when I feel it. I have this gut instinct to go to make decisions. I can make decisions quickly. We don't always know how to articulate why it's right. And so I went back to school to do this, and what I learned— literally the very first week I read an article and I was like, oh, so there's two parts of our brain. There's the, the task network and there's the domain network, right? And in one of them we get shit done, and in one, we dream and we have possibility, right? So you have the negative, uh, emotional effect and you have the positive emotional effect. And it sounds like negative is bad and positive is good, but it turns out we need both of 'em. So when we're in this positive emotional attractor state, we are dreaming, we are imagining, we're thinking about possibility. This is when teams do their best brainstorming. This is when we get together and we like jam on ideas. It's amazing. But if all you did was jam on ideas and everyone's in this positive emotional attractor space, you don't get anything done. So you have to get to the negative emotional attractor space, which is the task network. And once you're in the task network, you create plans, you create task lists, you, you know, you have deadlines, you figure out how things get done. So we have to be in both places, but our brains will naturally pull ourselves to the negative emotional attractor space, which is why people, their immediate reaction is, this is gonna be bad. I'm going to fail. And there's studies that show that if you wanna bring your team together to do great brainstorming, creative thinking, to actually see them and talk to them and say, like, I believe in you. I think that you're great. You show the shared vision. This is where we're going, and I see you as part of it. And then once they're in that space where they feel good and they feel positive and they're imagining the future, they can brainstorm really well. And then after that, we can bring them into the negative emotional attractor space in this test domain network and actually have conversations about, well, now how does it get done? And so if we're in this space where we think things are going to go well, we spend much more time in that imagination space that allows us to see ourselves ourselves in a way we've never seen ourselves before. And once we see ourselves in this way we've never seen ourselves before, it's hard to unsee it. And then we're left with, you know, do I want to live into this new me or not?

Right, right. And I think we are hardwired to go to that negative space. But what they've found in some of the studies that I've seen is if you can have 3 times as much focus on possibility versus the negativity, or what could go wrong— 3 times as much as what could go right versus wrong— you're really be in a mode now for exponential growth. Imagine that. But I think we're actually hardwired probably for the opposite, like 75— it depends on your own personal style, but you might be looking at what could go wrong, or 50/50, right? Maybe we need to be 50/50. But I was shocked to find out that it should be actually 3 times as much opportunity in a situation than negativity in a situation.

You know, when I wrote Wonderhell, I kept circling around this idea of manifestation, and I was like, manifestation is nonsense. I can't write about manifestation to be taken seriously as a business thinker, as an executive coach, as a keynoter? Like, that's just, that's a little too like Coachella woo for me. Like, I can't write about it. And then I started digging into the science of manifestation, and I was so like, it blew my mind. Because here's what I learned: our brains take in 11 million bits of data every single second. 11 million bits. Like, what's the temperature in the room? How does the waistline of my pants feel? I'm reading this email, I'm thinking about, you know, making pancakes for my kids tomorrow. Like, everything coming in from single different thing that dings on your phone, everything. 11 million bits of data, but we can only process 50. 50. 50 of 11 million. So our brains have to sort through all of the data to figure out what's important. And so I learned that manifestation works. Like, say you want to go to Tokyo, right? And you're like, I really want to go to Tokyo. I wish there was a sale to Tokyo. I'd really love to go. Be so pretty. I could see the cherry blossoms in the spring. It would be amazing. So if you think to yourself, I want to do that. You think to yourself you want to do it, and then like you go on with your day. But if you write it on your little vision board in like pretty pink swirly font, the next day you're driving down the street and a bus passes you and Japan Airlines is having a sale to Japan, and you're like, oh my God, I manifested it. Well, you didn't manifest it. The process of actually writing it down and being intentional about it and like writing it, seeing it, reading it, like seeing that it's there, just the very act of Just being intentional about writing it down signals to your brain, hey, pick out Japan if you see anything about it in the sea of 11 million bits of data every single second that are coming into your brain. And so we just have to signal to our brain, I want to spend more time in the positive space. I want to spend more time in the imagination space. I want to spend more time dreaming about what can be instead of what might never be.

Well, this is interesting because if we take this concept, I mean, you're an athlete now, obviously, having done a marathon, but you interviewed athletes, and I always say that athletes visualize crossing the finish line, right? They, in their mind, they can see what the end state looks like and they picture that. And the more you can visualize that, what you're really going after, the more you'll be drawn to that versus if you visualize the pothole that might be there, you're kind of, you know, studies show you're actually veer more towards the pothole. Now let's take this concept into one of the interesting things that just happened with winning of the Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, right? She said she went there not with like, "Oh, I've got to get this gold medal," but it was almost in a way her detachment from it, or at least in some of the interviews I've seen, that allowed her to really shine because what she focused on was her actual skating in the moment and just enjoying that, and then whatever happened happened. What do you make of sort of a little bit of this distinction? Like, how was she able to do it and not get almost too attached to that gold medal? And what happens when that gets in the way? Yeah, it's very interesting.

I can't put myself inside of her head, but I can put myself inside of the head of Alex Ferreira, who just won the gold medal for halfpipe men's freestyle. Those are the guys who, like, on two skis, do the halfpipe. They go up, they do like, you know, 1040, you know, 4 rotations in the air, and then come back down. They go back and forth. It is insane sport. And the reason it's insane is because it's so new and it is so dangerous. And as soon as somebody goes up and does 960, they're like, okay, well, 960 is not going to cut it. Somebody's got to do 1040. Done 1040. All right, someone's got to do 1180 or whatever. I can't do the math. But, you know, like, they're making the sport up as they go along, and it's getting harder and harder and harder. Now, Alex had won the bronze medal, and he had won the X Games, and he was so incredibly stressed about winning. He just felt like he had to bring home the gold. And so his reaction was, I'm just gonna outperform everybody. I'm gonna outwork them. I'm gonna outperform them. I'm gonna out-train them. I'm gonna out-perfect them. And so he kept going every single time to be perfect every single time. And because he was so focused on being perfect, something little always went wrong. And he was like, well, I can't be perfect. And it really got in his head. It was really hard. And then right before the X Games about 2 years ago, 3 years ago, he, uh, hurt his back. And he hurt his back shoveling snow off his mom's mom's roof. So I was like, you know, you gotta love a boy who loves his mom. But he hurt his back, and so he went to the X Games in a lot of pain. He just— he didn't even know if he could do the run. And his coach said to him, don't worry about being perfect, like, just do one run. Like, just do one run, you're gonna be fine. And he grew up wanting to ski, wanting to do this, having nightmares that he would fall, like, in the most important moment. And he did the first run, and he fell, and he was like, well, it's all over. And then the coach was like, just do one more run, just do one more run. And because he was like, like, well, I can't win now, so like I'm released, like the monkey's off my back, I'm totally released, I can't be perfect. He went on the run, he did the best run he'd ever done in his entire life, and he got the highest score that had ever been gotten in the X Games, and he won gold at the X Games. P.S., he just finally won gold. He won bronze at the Olympics 8 years ago, he won silver at the Olympics 4 years ago, and this year he brought home the gold medal. And he said to me, because I reached out to him afterwards, and he was like, I have worked so hard for this. This is like, I wanted this forever, and I have everything I could possibly do to work. And just knowing that it was the last thing, I had this enormous amount of pressure on me. But also, I was like, if it doesn't happen now, it's not going to happen. Like, it's— it— you just go out and you do the best that you can. And so my guess is, for Alyssa Liu, she felt so released by it because she decided not to do things the way that she was told by the trainers and her dad and everyone else to like be perfect, eat these foods, train this way, use this music, that she was like, I'm just going to do it my way, and it's either going to work or it's not. You can't be insatiably hungry for someone else's goals. You can't be insatiably hungry for someone else's plans. And so I think she just found that intrinsic motivation that allowed her to be so fully of herself that her talent— there's no question, right? Her talent spoke for itself. But her joy— her joy was so contagious that you couldn't help but be part of it.

And her relaxed state and everything in the midst of that. Absolutely. Yeah.

The men's figure skating, right? Ilya, right? He's the quad god, right? There's so much pressure, and he won. Be perfect with everything, and then he totally fell. And I feel for this kid, right? Because the struggle— like, he has to now live with that. That, that's going to sit on him for 4 more years until the next Olympics, and that's tough pressure.

Yeah. And so handling then all that self-talk of you— now you have the opportunity to make it to the Olympics, and yet now where you go mentally and how you recover to step up is— but still, all the things you're talking about in your book still apply, right? Because it It's still looking at things as an invitation versus that limitation on it. That's what I think Alyssa did is she was like, "I get to skate at the Olympics. This is awesome. And whatever happens, happens. And I'm not going to be— It'd be nice, great, but I don't have to get that in order to feel good about me." And maybe there's some of that distinction there too. Yeah.

One of the hilarious professional hazards of my job is that I happen to like I know an Olympian in every town. I speak at these events and there's always other speakers in the green room. And, you know, you can't swing a dead cat in my industry without hitting a gold medal winner, right? It's hysterical because I'm like, oh, what was your sport? Meanwhile, I'm like the least athletic person ever. And one of the recent Olympians I met, a guy by the name of Connor Fields, he's the only American ever to win the Olympics in BMX cycling. So those are the guys that like, they like cycle these little bikes and they like go up and down on these little jumps. And it's an incredibly dangerous sport. Also, all these Olympians and their sports are so dangerous. Alyssa Lou is like flying around the ice with blades on her feet, you know, it's totally nuts. So I called him up and I said, you know, I'm going to be in Vegas for a keynote, I don't know if you're around, but I have to— I'm training for another marathon, I have to run 13 miles on Friday, do you want to run with me? His reaction was like, I don't think I can run 13 miles, I'm a sprinter. And so I was like, well, I'm 55 and you're 30 and you're 6 foot tall and you have a gold medal from the Olympics, I think you can keep up with me, I think you're gonna be okay. I kind of dared him a little bit, but We were having this whole conversation about how when you go to the Olympics, like the, the answer is gold or nothing, right? Like the difference between winning gold and winning silver is like milliseconds. And the, the most interesting study that he and I were talking about is that people who win bronze medals are actually happier than people who win silver medals. Mm-hmm. Right? So people who win bronze medals are happier than people who win silver medals because if you win gold, you're like, I won gold. Amazing. I, I, I won, I won the Olympics. Olympics. If you win silver, you're like, oh, I lost, right? If you win bronze, you're like, thank God I podium, right?

Like, I made it, I got a medal, like, got lucky.

So it's very interesting to think about, like, we have— all of us in our lives have these expectations about how things are going to go, right? And we have this idea that it's either going to be perfect or it's not. And there's so much space outside of perfect. We're never perfect. Serena Williams isn't perfect, right? Roger Federer isn't perfect. These are the best tennis players that ever lived. And, and, you know, I saw a graduation speech where Roger Federer was talking about like how he's lost more points than won, and yet he's the, you know, winningest male tennis player in history. But we have this idea that it's perfect or not. And so what happens then is that we do say a big presentation, we don't get it perfect. So we go back and what do we practice? We practice the stuff we got wrong and we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that the stuff that we got right, we got right intentionally, when in fact we might have just gotten lucky. Tricky, and we don't groove the pattern of that. And so I always encourage people that I coach to not just practice the things you get wrong, but actually groove the pattern of the stuff you got right. Because A, you don't know if you got it right on purpose, and B, if you did get it right on purpose, all it serves to do when you get it right again and again and again is teach you what it feels like to get something right so that you can feel that flexibility, that confidence, like you have a little bit more control so that you can then improvise in that Absolutely.

And so what would you suggest? Let's get tactical for a moment. What are things that you see leaders could do, let's say starting tomorrow, that would help them set the right course to be limitless for themselves? For themselves, yeah. Okay. Or the people they lead. I mean, really both.

So I would say that the biggest mistake that leaders make is that they think all of their people are incentivized by the same thing. Everybody's like, oh, like, my staff is unhappy.

I just need to give them a raise.

Well, maybe, right? Maybe. Yeah. So we, we did in 2019, we started a, a global workforce engagement study. We have about 10,000 responses from 113 different countries, every possible demographic, every possible industry. And what I can tell you is that when I was in executive search, we used to listen for 8 motivating factors on a phone call about whether or not somebody might want to leave to to consider a new job. And they were things like, am I inspired by the leader? How big is the challenge? How deep is the impact? What's the mission of the organization? Where is it located? How prestigious will it look on my resume? How much money will I make? Right. These 8 motivating factors. And in the survey that we did, this very like 50-question assessment, again, 10,000 responses, 113 different countries, every possible demographic, every possible industry, we found that 36% of people said money is the most important factor. Factor. 36%. Yeah. Which leaves 64% of people who are incentivized by something else. And the issue is that we think our people, we think that they know that we like them because we pay them, because we give them some compliments, but we don't actually know what incentivizes them. So the first thing I would say that leaders need to do is to really understand what drives their people, what their people care about. Because, you know, if you've got that salesperson who was crushing it and they're making their goals all the time and they keep showing up in your office like, what have you done for me lately? Like, where's my bonus? They might care about the money, but they also might care about manifesting their values on a daily basis at work. And so putting them in charge of your corporate philanthropy program may make them the happiest people in the world. But you don't know that because you're just assuming that everybody's not only incentivized by the same thing, but the same thing as you.

Exactly. That's exactly why we, in the work that I am a big believer in, we use the Enneagram a lot. And the Enneagram is looking at what drives you or motivates you, not behavior, which a lot of other types of assessments do, but underneath it, why you do what you do, not what you do. And when you get to that level of why, you start to realize not everybody sees the world the way you do. And in fact, that's actually a good thing because we want people motivated by different things. Because of that motivation, they bring a different perspective and lens to the situation. And having that level of cognitive diversity, it was really what makes the difference.

Absolutely. Like, some people want to be home at 6 o'clock every night to have dinner with their kids. Some people want to be on the road because they want to see the world, right? Some people, um, some people are interested in, in maximizing their profitability right now at this moment in time. Everybody has a different reason for what they do. And by the way, everybody's reasons change throughout their career. So just because you think somebody was incentivized by something 10 years ago when you hired them doesn't mean that's where they are today.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, where can people learn more about you and your work, and what would you recommend they take as the next step?

So my name is LauraGassnerOetting.com, and you can find me at LauraGassnerOetting.com. But all my friends call me LGO because Laura Gassner Oetting is a lot of name. You can find me on all the socials at Hey, H-E-Y, Hey LGO. Reach out to me there. If people are interested in finding out where in Wonderhell they are, they can go to WonderhellQuiz.com. And if you want to take that assessment that I mentioned, that's at LimitlessAssessment.com.

Excellent. Well, thanks so much for bringing your wisdom. I'm excited for you getting a doctorate. What is the doctorate in, by the way?

Um, it's a Doctorate of Business Administration, so it's a terminal business degree, and I am studying my— I'm hoping my dissertation will be around the use of intuition and hiring decision-making. Oh, I like it.

I like it so much. Well, I'm looking forward to— one, I imagine out of that you'll probably write another book about what you discover, so we'll look forward to seeing that at some point in the future. How much more time do have before?

I have, I have 2 and a half years. So I'm— it's a 3-year program and I'm in the spring semester. And I would say I have 2 and a quarter years, but I'm in the middle of quantitative reasoning, which feels like a whole lot of time. So I'm just giving myself that extra. By the way, if you were listening to this and you, uh, run human resources, uh, for your company, or if you are an executive whose success depends on you hiring the right people, reach out to me. I'd love to interview you for my dissertation.

Excellent. All right, great. Well, if you like this episode, you're not gonna wanna miss my interview with Heather Hansen, who discusses charisma, which just isn't charm, is a skill that leaders can build. Let's all lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.

Thank you.