High Impact at Low Decibels

Anita Brick:
Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. And today we're delighted, I would say more than delighted to have as our guest, Mike Schiller. He has more than 30 years of experience at Fortune 500 companies as a technical expert and as an executive-level leader, and most recently was Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Texas Instruments. He is currently president of Onward Consulting, specializing in information security and audit consulting. Mike is a graduate f Texas A&M and he is an anxiety-filled introvert and enjoying helping others with similar challenges. And Mike loves the book, the book is called High Impact at Low Decibels. You said what a lot of us are thinking, even extroverts like me. I think that you gave us some really great tips. I'm just really excited that you're here.

Mike Schiller:
Well, thank you. I appreciate those nice comments and I'm excited to be here.

Anita Brick:
Great. An MBA student said, "In your book, you share an example of what goes on in your head when you second-guess yourself during conversations. This sounds like me. What you wrote really resonated." How do you quiet that critical voice?

Mike Schiller:
That's a great question. Even when I'm having the most inane conversation, I pass somebody in the hallway and I'm just saying hello and talking about their weekend, and somebody observing that 30-second conversation would think it was the most nothing conversation ever. In my head, I'm sitting there having all these comments to myself about, "Oh, you didn't remember his name in time, so you didn't say his name. Did he notice that you didn't say his name, and oh, does he now think you don't know his name? And maybe, should I work it in later so he knows I know his name? And oh, what did he just say? Oh, he said he just went to the baseball game with his kids last weekend, and oh, he told me that last week. And oh, why didn't I remember that? And I'm so stupid. What's wrong with me? I'm such an idiot." So this whole inner dialogue going on during the conversation and then after the conversation beating myself up.

Anita Brick:
I get it too. So how do you actually quiet that very critical voice?

Mike Schiller:
During the conversation, you really do have to get that voice to be quiet because it takes away from you engaging in the conversation. If I'm ruminating like that in my head and criticizing myself in the middle of the conversation, I'm not fully engaged. I'm not fully listening to that person. That becomes an awareness and a focus thing, at least for me. It takes a lot of vigilance and it's exhausting, but when I feel myself starting to go down that path of overthinking and over criticizing, I just have to say, "No. I'm going to just focus on this person's mouth and the words coming out of their mouth, and I'm just going to be laser focused on those words. Just awareness and willpower of stopping that." Afterwards, it's a little more complicated, because to me, it's okay to have some reflection afterwards. How did that conversation go and how do I feel about it?

Reflection is very helpful for us to self-identify potential issues and to improve. And sometimes it's good to realize, oh, maybe what I said could have been misinterpreted, or it gives you an opportunity to go back and correct things that maybe you said that were offensive or anything like that. So that kind of self-reflection is okay, but there's a difference between self-reflection and self-flagellation, and that's when it turns into this beat down of yourself and a cycle of criticism. That's when it's not healthy. That gets into this whole self-talk thing, and not only from a social anxiety standpoint, from an imposter syndrome standpoint. I'm just constantly beating myself up for any small mistake that I might have made.

Probably the most common words coming out of my mouth are things like, you know, I hate myself. I'm such an idiot, I'm so stupid. Those things, they don't put you in a position to be successful, right? They don't put you in the right frame of mind. Similarly, I'm constantly replaying mistakes in my head of everything that I've done wrong in my entire life, including a conversation I might've just had that didn't go as well as I should have. I'll just keep replaying and replaying, and again, it doesn't put you in the right frame of mind either.

Anita Brick:
Oh, of course.

Mike Schiller:
That whole self-talk thing, saying to yourself how stupid you are, constantly replaying these mistakes isn't really helpful. I've got this thing that I call changing the channel. When I'm realizing that I'm not doing healthy self-reflection, but I'm just doing self-flagellation and just replaying these mistakes, I just realize I have to change the channel. I actually have a physical mechanism. If I'm in a place where it won't look too weird, I'll knock on my head, which is sort of like my signal, okay.

Anita Brick:
Not too hard, I hope.

Mike Schiller:
Not too hard, yeah, because that could have its own issues. Yeah.

Anita Brick:
Right. There you go.

Mike Schiller:
But that's sort of a physical indication to myself like, I need to change this channel. This is not a healthy channel. In an ideal world, yeah, I would then fill my head with wonderful things that I've done in the past and wonderful memories, but I'm not good enough to come up with those on the spot. I can just be like, you know what? I'm just going to think about what I did last weekend, or what I'm planning to do this weekend or make my grocery list, or just anything that gets me out of that cycle of beating myself up.

And if I'm in a meeting with other people and I start beating myself up over maybe some comment that I had made just earlier in the meeting or whatever, I'll just knock on my leg like, okay, we're going to change the channel on that. In the moment when you're having that conversation, it's awareness and focus like, I am going to just look at this person's mouth, look them in the eyes, and I'm just going to pay attention to what they're saying and I'm going to stop that flow of trying to second guess what I've said. And then afterwards, healthy self-reflection is okay. When it gets into self-flagellation or negative self-talk, you got to stop the flow of words, you got to change the channel.

Anita Brick:
I agree. And I think that it could be something simple, moving or taking a short walk, anything that makes you shift. All right. Here's the harder question. In the book, you talk about a colleague coming to you and they did the beating up. They went on and on and on and on and on about what you didn't do right. And of course, I shouldn't say of course, but I think of course it resonated with that imposter syndrome part of us. Tell us how you move forward from that, because I would think that would be harder to do than if it's all coming from inside.

Mike Schiller:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm always on the edge of feeling like I'm inferior to everybody else anyway, right? It's always this thinly veiled thing of, okay, I've got myself in a decent enough place now to be confident, and it doesn't take much for somebody to just kind of slap me back down. And this was a case where I went to meet with somebody, a very important colleague. I thought it was just a normal one-on-one meeting. We had them every week or so, and I think we're going to cover some status updates, and they just kind of unloaded on me of, "Hey, here's this giant list of everything you've been doing that has been annoying me."

And a lot of it was very valid feedback, but boy, when you're not prepared for that and you've got this laundry list that goes on for an hour of somebody telling you, "Hey, I had a problem with this, I had a problem with this and I don't like the way you're doing this," yeah, I left there just completely downtrodden, depressed. Went home, you know, I could barely even engage with my kids. I'm just sitting there thinking, "How do I bounce back from this?" My daughter helped me.

Anita Brick:
She wrote a beautiful note to you. I think that was lovely.

Mike Schiller:
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. What was nice about that experience, even though it wasn't a nice experience overall, was my daughter asked me what's wrong? And I had that thought process of, do I share with her or do I not? But she struggles with a lot of the same things I do, so I thought, you know what? It's not bad for her to know that her dad has bad days and struggles with these same things. So I just told her about it and I got up the next morning still feeling just as down, and I go to my treadmill where I start every morning doing a walk and she'd left this note for me, just the sweetest note telling me how much she loves me and how great I am, and how I deserve to be happy, something that brought tears to my eyes.

And one, it helped me remember perspective. Obviously I want to do a great job at work and I want everyone to respect me, but I've got a family who thinks I'm awesome, and that really is the most important thing. Being reminded of that sort of thing really does help you with perspective on how to deal with something at work that maybe has got you down. And so it really helped me get in the right frame of mind to do what I think is always critical to do when you get feedback, because we all need feedback. We all should be on the path of continuous improvement.

We're going to be on the path of continuous improvement. We need feedback. We want people to give us feedback, but we have to respond to that feedback in a healthy way. Even the most normal feedback, unlike this, which was an hour of feedback, even the most normal feedback, I can have a tendency to just spiral into self negativity and beating myself up over whatever that mistake was. That's not helpful. What is helpful is to take an action-oriented approach to it, which is what exactly am I going to do to address this feedback?

Anita Brick:
You actually had a second conversation with this person. Maybe you could share a little bit about what you did.

Mike Schiller:
Yeah. Once I had the right frame of mind, I went back through my notes, because I took notes while I was getting this feedback, and kind of broke it down into 10 distinct items of, okay, these are the specific things that I heard as feedback. And for each one, thought through what I thought I could or should do differently. And for like eight of them, I could come up with something, and two of them I'm like, I'm not sure I agree with this feedback or I need more clarity. So then I asked to talk with that person later on that afternoon. I said, "Hey, I want to follow up with you on the things that you discussed with me yesterday." Got on her calendar and I walked through and said, "Hey, these are the things that I heard. I heard 10 things." And even just saying that, she was like, "Wow, I didn't realize it was 10 things, but okay, let's go through it," and went through one by one.

This is what I heard. Did I hear that correctly? Yes or no? Okay, great. Well, here's what I'm planning to do related to that feedback, does that seem reasonable? On the ones where I really didn't agree, I said, "Hey, I'm struggling with this one a little bit. Can you help me a little bit more understand what your concern is here?" And on both of those, when I brought those up on further reflection, she said, "You know what? That probably was not valid feedback. I think you probably should just not worry about that one." And at the end she said, "Well, I didn't realize I'd given you so much feedback. I wouldn't have thought it was a list of 10 things, but you're right. Those are all things that I said."

The thing is that when you do that, well, and you're showing the person you're taking their feedback very, very seriously, it really strengthened our relationship. It did it in a very constructive way. Even though I might not have loved the way the feedback all came to me all at once when I was not expecting it, a lot of it was very valid feedback and things that I needed to here and helped me improve. And by going back to her so constructively and with a specific plan, I think it left a very positive impression with her.

Anita Brick:
I agree. Relationships clearly for many people are a source of, maybe anxiety is too strong a word, but certainly discomfort, because we need relationships. We do. We can't get things done at work, we can't have a happy life. We just can't do that. Couple of questions. One is from a friend of CareerCast, and she said, "Hi, Mike. Thanks for writing this book. I get stressed out when I have to network. It's not natural for me, and I can't even figure out who wants to build a genuine and authentic relationship with me. Your insights are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike."

Mike Schiller:
That's a good one. I laugh when I hear that one because even that word, networking, I'm just like, ugh. And I will say, I had a long and successful career without ever focusing on networking. And-

Anita Brick:
All right, but you built relationships. I read the book and I know you did. Tell us how you did it.

Mike Schiller:
Yeah, I was going to say instead, I focused on building strong and authentic relationships with people that I naturally worked with, and I do think there's a difference. I think when people think networking, at least what comes to my head is like, I'm just going to go try to build relationships with important people, even if I don't naturally work with them. And I don't know. To me, that whole thing is, it's phony.

Anita Brick:

I agree.

Mike Schiller:
I'm much a bigger fan of organic networking, people you have reason to interact with and that you can provide value to. I never went and set up meetings just for the sake of network. Oh, this is an important leader. I want them to know who I am. I'm going to get on their calendar so they know who I am. I mean, when I was a leader, I didn't really value those kinds of meetings. I don't work with you, I don't have anything to do with you, and you're just getting time with me just so I know who you are. There were times where someone might do that because, hey, I'm interested in someday moving into your area. I'd like to know more about it. Okay, that's fine. That's great.

Anita Brick:
Okay, so I don't want to stop you, but I'm going to stop you for a second. Tell us how you moved from being maybe even a little paralyzed to actually being someone who is known to build authentic relationships.

Mike Schiller:
Thanks for getting me back on track. That actually comes into one of the kind of structural things that's in the book. One of the ways I tried to structure things is this framework of wish versus reality, mitigation, and turning it into a strength. So the wish versus reality was, like you just said, relationships are really important, and I wanted to have strong relationships with people. It's critical for your career, none of us are successful on our own, and is good for us personally. We're very fulfilling to have strong relationships.

So I had a wish that I wanted to have strong relationships, but the reality was I'm an extreme introvert, like 93, 94% on the Myers-Briggs introvert scale. So I get my energy from being alone. And I get exhausted from being around people, even if I enjoy the time with them, it's an energy drainer, and I have a lot of social anxiety. Kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier. I'm always stressed when I'm talking with people and second guessing myself. So those things really could have interfered with building relationships because my natural inclination was, I want to be alone.

Anita Brick:
How did you move through it?

Mike Schiller:
So that goes into the mitigation. How do you mitigate that? One of the things I realized was, well, I can leverage other strengths I have. So what strengths do I have? Well, I'm super organized. I'm super task-oriented. I'm super responsible. I thought through that at one point in my, fairly early in my leadership career that, well, how can I leverage that? I realized, well, I can turn relationship building into a task. I can make a list of all of the people that are important for me to have good relationships with to do my job. This is not the phony networking, let me go get to know people that have no bearing on my job. This is the team that reports to me, my peers, my boss, my stakeholders. These are people I need to have good relationships with to do my job effectively.

And then for each of those, develop a process, a task, a routine for how do I maintain and develop strong relationships with them? And that could be just simple stuff, like periodic one-on-one meetings or periodic lunches or periodic roundtables with sub-teams of your group that reports to you. Scheduling time for management by walking around just saying, "Hey, I'm not going to just spontaneously get up and want to socialize." I realized that. So I put time on my calendar for this hour. I'm going to go do management by walking around, so just go around and touch base with people just so I know. I know it's coming and it's on my task list, so I'm going to go do it. It's interesting how that then became a strength because I was so focused on investing in those relationships and mitigating my natural tendencies, which would be being alone, that I was intentionally investing in those.

Now, I do want to say one other thing. It's not just about having time with people. It's about using that time effectively. Part of using that time effectively is making sure that you're not just all business all the time when you have those meetings. It's not just, okay, I have this one-on-one with you. Tell me the status on all your projects, now get out. That's not building a relationship. You want to make sure people understand that you care about them more as a person than as a resource, and so making sure you're structuring your time effectively.

And again, I'm a very structured person. I had in my head that part of the agenda for every meeting is that I'm going to spend time in personal conversation before diving into the work stuff. If you're a structured person like me, it's just making sure you've built that into your process, and so you've got that mitigation. Turning it into a strength, as you just said, is the third part. Because those relationships were important enough to me to mitigate my natural tendencies to want to be alone, I was intentional in developing them, and actually relationship building became a strength of mine.

Anita Brick:
I love that. When you talked about it, talked about making it a task and creating this process, and I know that that is very helpful because I know myself, if I create a process and structure, I can leave that structure because I know where to go, right? I can improvise a bit. But I'm just curious, how did you move from the structure you created so that it wasn't robotic, so that it was more natural?

Mike Schiller:
Part of it is just developing basic conversational skills because the structure part was, Anita, you and I are going to have a weekly one-on-one meeting, right? So that's the structure, so we've got it on the calendar, so it's going to happen. What would be robotic is if, okay, our meeting has started, these are the three agenda items, and as soon as you walk in the door like, "Okay, hey, do you have the status of number one? Okay, great, you have status number two?"

Anita Brick:
I see.

Mike Schiller:
The agenda, even if it's just in your head, has to include some, "Hey, how are you? How was your weekend?" So I had my go-to things that I could talk with anyone about, like any of us do. How was your weekend? You have any travel coming up or how's the family? And that sort of thing. One of the things that I did was, this goes back in the wish versus reality thing. Okay. So my wish is for every conversation I had that I would remember everything the person told me. That's my wish. But the reality is, my brain doesn't work that way.

I might be talking to you, I'm totally locked into what you're saying, fully paying attention to what you're saying. But two weeks later, I'm not going to remember exactly the names of all your kids and exactly what your family was going through. I may not remember all that just because I just don't, go into mitigation. Without being too obvious, I've tried to take notes about what I was hearing from them. Maybe it's a month later, I'm meeting with you again. I go back and look at those notes like, oh yeah. So I could then say, "Hey, you know, you mentioned your daughter was going through something. How's she doing?" Turning it into a strength, and people would appreciate the fact that I cared enough to remember to follow up. Again, I had to mitigate the fact that my brain doesn't naturally remember all that stuff.

Anita Brick:
I like that. I do that too. I think it's important. People feel valued when we remember things and if we don't remember them as a matter of course, if we write down a few notes here or there and bring it up, I think what you're doing is absolutely on target. There was another question from an alum and he said, "Hi, Mike. I've been told I'm not ready for a promotion because I lack executive presence. When I asked for specifics, I am told that leadership doesn't know me because I don't share my ideas in meetings with them. How do you advise others to speak up when you're kind of put on the spot without looking stupid or ill-prepared?"

Mike Schiller:
I'll do a quick tangent comment, but I'll do it really quickly so you don't have to correct me.

Anita Brick:
I love the fact that we are dialoguing.

Mike Schiller:

Right. Yeah.

Anita Brick:
I love that. Say whatever you want, all is open.

Mike Schiller:
A tangent comment is, that executive presence thing is such a pet peeve of mine.

Anita Brick:
Oh, yeah. Mine too.

Mike Schiller:
Hear that all the time. What does that mean exactly? So I love the fact this person asked for specifics and got something actionable.

Anita Brick:
Yeah, I like it too.

Mike Schiller:
So that is really good. When you're told, "Oh, hey, we just don't feel like you have executive presence," you need to ask, what do you mean? What am I doing or not doing that leads to that? Because otherwise, it is so vague, it's not actionable. So anyway, kudos to this person for asking. This is something actionable, and this thing about speaking up in meetings, it's so stressful. It's intimidating if you're in some meeting with 10 or 20 people and they're all looking at you and you feel this pressure to say something that's actually valuable, and it's not like a presentation where you can prepare ahead of time and know exactly what you're going to say. So I get it. First off, be prepared prior to the meeting. If you're going to a meeting on a certain topic, do what you can to be prepared. So when they ask, "How do I avoid looking ill-prepared?" Well, best way to avoid looking ill-prepared is to not be ill-prepared. So there's that.

Anita Brick:
Good point, good point.

Mike Schiller:
This was a problem for me too. I would so much rather speak to somebody one-on-one. So I'd be in these meetings, and again, it'd be 20 people, 30 people, I think of some point, and it's just so stressful for me to bring it up in front of everybody. I would convince myself like, you know what? I'll just follow up with that person after the meeting. That's not the effective way to do it. There could be occasions where it's such a niche comment that that's okay, but in general, you go do that, person's going to be like, "That's a great point. Sure would've been nice to hear that while we were in the middle of this discussion and making our decision. Now, what am I supposed to do with this? Do I have to call everybody together?"

It's not going to be effective and it's going to annoy people. And the other thing is it's not good optics, which I think is what this person is pointing to. If your reputation is basically the person who just sits there and doesn't say anything, it's not leaving a great impression. So you have to go do something to mitigate it. Wish versus reality. My wish is that I go to these meetings, I've got all this experience, I've got all this knowledge, I'm going to go contribute. The reality is, that's super stressful for me. My tendency is to want to stay quiet. The problem is, but before I talk, my wish is for my thoughts to be perfectly formed. I want to have my thoughts altogether before I speak.

The reality is it doesn't work that way because the conversation has moved on. Everyone else is just peppering comments back and forth, back and forth, and I'm trying to formulate my thought, and then 15 minutes later I'm like, "Oh, hey, you know that conversation we were having 10 minutes ago? Now I've got a comment on it." Everyone's annoyed. "Seriously? We've moved on from that." Again, it goes into the mitigation. What can you do to mitigate that? There are a few physical things that I would do that would help me. Posture and breathing are such big stress relief, anxiety relief tools for me. Both of those can have an impact on how focused I feel and relieving my stress. Posture, the whole sitting up, broad shoulder, shoulders back, making yourself broader and bigger. Dr. Amy Cuddy did a whole TED Talk on it. There's this concept that that actually helps reduce stress levels and increase confidence levels.

So I was big on sitting up. I'd sit up at the table in the conference room or if I'm against the wall, just be sitting up straight. Earlier in my career, I would sit back and kind of make myself smaller, and I found that it made it harder than for me to be mentally prepared to interject and I would feel more stressed, and because I'm sitting back, it's harder to project my voice. So there's all kinds of reasons that helps. And then breathing, now, if I was in a stressful meeting, before the meeting would start, or maybe during the meeting, I would just do breathing. I'd do this 4-7-8 breathing technique of breathe in through my nose for four seconds, hold it for seven seconds, breathe out through my mouth for eight seconds, do that two or three times, and I'd find I would just feel sharper and less stressed. So those are just kind of general stress relief techniques that I would just use when I was in those meetings that helped put me in a better frame of mind.

I also found that positioning myself in the room where I was made a difference. If I'm in a big room and there's like somebody presenting at the front, or maybe the boss is at the front, and that's kind of the focal point of who maybe I need to talk to, if I'm at the back of the room, it's harder for me to feel confident in making my comments because I see all these people looking at me as I'm talking, and I'm having to talk louder to reach that person. Whereas if I'm sitting towards the front and they're just a couple of feet away from me, I can kind of convince myself I'm just talking one-on-one and ignore all these other people and it could feels more comfortable. I would try to get to rooms a little early so that I could be positioned more towards the front because I knew I'd feel more confident and comfortable. The other thing, and this is a tough one, it's the Nike, the just do it thing.

Unfortunately, that really is the case when it comes to like me wanting to perfectly formulate my thought before I start talking. That is a case where the perfect is the enemy of the great or the good. By trying to be perfect, I contribute nothing because I don't get my comment out in time. So I had to just start speaking before I had my thought perfectly formulated, and just trust myself. If I have a general idea of what I want to say, I can start the comment and trust that I'll actually manage to come up with something coherent along the way. That's a case where practice makes better. As you get more confidence, like as you do it, it's not a train wreck, you're like, "Okay, I can actually do this thing." That's the hardest one. The posture and breathing and position in the room are a little more, I can do this thing. It's a very specific thing. Unfortunately, part of it is you just have to take the dive, and if you have something to say, just start talking and have confidence you will figure it out along the way.

Anita Brick:
I like that. You know, there's a follow on question from another student, and he said, "I know that practice makes perfect. How can a person practice in areas that may seem scary and even a bit risky? What are some safer areas to practice?"

Mike Schiller:
And obviously it's very situation-specific, but look for lower risk opportunities sometimes outside of your job to do some of these things. I'll give a couple of examples. It sounded like this was a student. When I went to A&M, we had a student programs office. It was an amazing opportunity to build leadership skills, so I took on various leadership roles through that student programs office where I got to learn how to lead a team and do finance and interviewing and that sort of thing. If you're already working, maybe there's nonprofits, there's your church. That is one thing I think really worth considering is are there opportunities outside of your job where you can maybe develop some of these skills where you can stumble and learn things without such severe consequences? Or even within your job, there may be smaller opportunities to go lead the United Way campaign or what have you for your team where you can just start picking up some of those skills you're trying to develop.

One way to do it is sort of find those low risk opportunities to develop those skills. The opposite is maybe immersion or exposure therapy, and I did that with public speaking. That was one where I knew based on my career path, I had to be a good public speaker. And I wasn't feeling great about my skills, so I took training and all that sort of thing, but I just, that was one where I just decided to do the whole immersion therapy thing and I started signing up to speak at conferences. I'm going to sink or swim here. I'm just going to force my way, get past my fear of it. I'm going to own this instead of letting it own me. I went to speak at these conferences.

The first couple of times, I mean, I was just terrified. The morning of, I'm just like, what was I doing? What was I thinking? This is horrible. This is the worst thing ever. But I had prepared, I knew my material, and they went well. I did that for a few years where, you know, I would speak at a couple of big conferences a year, again, just to develop those skills. It got to the point where I'd be going to speak in front of, you know, whatever, three, 400 people, and I would barely feel nervous just because I had done it enough times and been successful. I was like, okay, I know I've got this. I think those are both valid approaches is find those lower risk ways to go develop the skills, or just say, "I'm going to dive in. Either I'm going to conquer it or it's going to conquer me, but let's get going on that."

Anita Brick:
Well, you did a really good job of that, and you put in, if I remember correctly, for let's just say it was a half hour speech, you would have three or four or five times as much prep ahead of time practicing and all of that stuff. It is a little scarier, and in some areas, the deep dive is a good way to go, and clearly for you it was because I remember someone telling you that you were an amazing speaker, and it just showed how far you had come.

Mike Schiller:
It was really meaningful that it really did become something that was a strength where I was getting that feedback of people really felt like I was doing a good job of speaking. I was asked to speak at a lot of different places within my company or outside of my company, and it is really cool to look back and say, yeah, I was no good at this and I decided to invest in it.

Anita Brick:
And you did, and clearly you are continuing to do that because of the book too.

Mike Schiller:
Oh, thanks. I was really excited to get the book out there. It's an interesting experience too, because I did this because I thought it was something that could be helpful to other people. I thought it could be a meaningful thing to kind of put out there in the world. I think it's an underserved topic because there are a lot of us who are anxiety-filled people, extreme introverts, and don't meet what we generally think of as the classic success profile where you tend to think of those super confident extroverts, which isn't the case. That's what you tend to think of.

Anita Brick:
Yeah, that's true.

Mike Schiller:
I put that out there. But if it's going to be effective, if it's going to help people, then people have to be aware that it exists. Uh, interviews like this are very, very stress-inducing, right? Even though you're awesome to talk to and make it very easy, there's a big part of me that just wants to live an anonymous life, right? I really don't desire any attention, right? I'm just happy to be as anonymous as possible, but on something like this, that's not an effective way to do things. I'm grateful and appreciative of the opportunities to talk with folks like you and share some of these thoughts and increase exposure to the book, but there's a big part of me that's just like, no, I don't want to do any of that because I want to be anonymous. But again, that's not effective, and so sometimes you have to just go outside your comfort zone in order to be effective in what you're trying to do.

Anita Brick:
Absolutely. Do you have time for one more question?

Mike Schiller:

Absolutely.

Anita Brick:
You've given us a lot to think about. You've given us, I would say, very practical, actionable encouragement, and if you could boil it down to three things, what are three things that you would advise someone to do who wants to positively create high impact, maybe with lower decibels, and thrive professionally? What would those three things be?

Mike Schiller:
The first is kind of the whole message of the book, which is understanding your potential challenges that may make things a little more difficult for you. Like for me, it was the social anxiety, it was being resistant to change and things like that. Having the self-awareness to know what those things are, which you get either through self-reflection or from getting feedback from others. And for each of those things, investing the time to think through what are specific mitigation techniques I can put in place to keep those things from derailing me? Because none of those are going to kind of be resolved on their own, by magically. You have to be specific on thinking through what are things I can do to mitigate those from being derailers, which will lead to you being surprised that it creates some strengths for you once you've kind of addressed those.

So that'd be one is just being very, very intentional about identifying those areas. Two would be we all have to have a toolkit of stress relief kind of techniques, because anxiety and stress can make life more difficult for you. It can also be derailers, so you have to have your go-to toolkit for how you're going to manage those things. I talked about posture and breathing. I talked about self-talk. I've kind of referenced exercise. Those are things that I've realized really help me feel prepared and sharper and ready to tackle things. There are a million places you can go to find potential stress relief techniques. Maybe you like mindfulness, you figure those out, but identify those things and practice them so they're ready to go. And then the third I would say is a mindset, which is we all have our own challenges. Everyone has things they deal with that may cause anxiety or more difficult for them.
The key is to have a mindset of not using that as an excuse. You don't wallow in those things. The first point I talked about in answering this question was identifying and mitigating, and this is kind of related to that, is you don't wallow. You don't use those as an excuse. You don't say, "Hey, I have social anxiety, or I'm an extreme introvert, so you know what? I'm just not going to have strong relationships with people." It doesn't work like that. You're not going to be successful. You can't tell your boss, "Well, sorry my relationships are bad with my co-workers, but you know, I have social anxiety." They're going to say, "Well, that's a requirement of your job. Sorry, that's not an excuse. You've got to figure this out." Having a mindset of being aware of these things is great because it puts you in a position to mitigate them. And when you fall short, understand why and maybe do something about it, but it's not an excuse for not meeting your behavior expectations for your job.

Anita Brick:
Well, Mike, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for writing the book. I love the structure of the chapters with wish, reality and mitigation, and turning them into strengths. I think it is very easy and practical, and I also think, just to acknowledge you, I think it takes a lot of courage to do all the things that you've done in your career and life, including having this conversation with me today.

Mike Schiller:
Oh, thank you, Anita. I appreciate that, and I really appreciate you having me on. I've enjoyed this conversation.

Anita Brick:
I'm glad. I'm glad. Well, thanks again and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.