Reset Your Work Life

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Gail Golden. She is a licensed psychologist and an MBA-holding entrepreneur who understands both the emotions and economics. Current and former clients include Best Buy, BMO Harris Bank, Northern Trust Mead Johnson, and many others.

Her book, which is a great book, by the way, Gail, Curating your Life, is based on what she's learned over more than two decades of helping leaders of all types maximize their achievements. Gail has extensive experience as a media commentator and has taught at Chicago Booth. She has been quoted in Fast Company, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and as a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

Anita Brick: If it's okay, I'd like to start with a question from an MBA student. May give us a little bit of a frame. Her question was: “I am in the midst of needing to reset my work life. Where do I start and what are the first actions I can take?”

Gail Golden: You know, it's a terrific question, but of course, like any good psychologist, I just have a lot of questions that I would ask her back if I was in conversation with her. First of all, I would say everybody needs to do this from time to time. We make decisions. They work well for us for a while, and then something changes and we need to do the reset. Sometimes it's a little thing, sometimes it's a big thing. There are all kinds of reasons why people choose to do that reset. And then the steps that you should take vary as a result of that.

The first thing is clarity and maybe I can just use my own life as an example of what I'm talking about. For the first half of my career, worked as a clinical psychologist. I had a psychotherapy practice. I loved it, it was really hard work. It took a very long time to get to be good at it. I got to be good at it. And then one day I was sitting with a new client and listening to him tell me why he was in my office, and I heard myself thinking, I know you. I know what you're going to say. I know what I'm going to say. I know how long this is going to take. I know how it's going to turn out. And I thought, oh my, this is not good. It's not fair to my client. He deserves a therapist who is more engaged than that. And it's not fair to me. I deserve work that engages me more. And that was the beginning of a major life reset for me. Okay, I thought I was going to be a therapist until the day I drop dead. If it's not going to be that, what is it going to be and how do I figure that out? So I think that clarity piece is a really important first step. That requires a really open mind in terms of both what is it that I want and also the how. That's what I want. How do I go about that?

Anita Brick: And I think it goes along with something an alum asked. This can be part of the process I'm assuming. And for me I definitely relate to this question. I have the same challenge. So the question is: “I'm an alum. How do you prioritize aspects of your work life when everything feels like a high priority?”

Gail Golden: Well, Anita, as you know, I recently wrote a book about exactly that question and about the enormous damage that we do to ourselves and frankly, to the quality of our work when we make everything a high priority. Because when you do that, you typically, first of all, end up feeling exhausted and inadequate and overwhelmed, which drains you of your energy. Number one. And number two, the quality of your work isn't as good because you are putting too much energy into things that don't matter that much, and that doesn't leave you with enough energy for the things that really matter. And the image that I use that helps me to get clear about that is, you know, if you have a stove with four burners, how many pots can you cook at the same time? Now, when I ask people this question, they typically think it's a trick question or they start saying, well, get another stove, whatever. No, no, no, you got a stove, four burners. How many pots can you cook at the same time? The answer is four. And then the question is, if you have another pot that you think you need to cook, what do you have to do? And the answer is you got to take something off the stove. You cannot cook 17 pots on a four burner stove. The food will not get cooked properly, and you will probably end up with a big mess on your kitchen floor. But we are doing that to ourselves all the time. We're trying to cook 17 pots on a four burner stove, and that's why we end up as a mess on the floor.

For me, this is a very rigorous discipline that you have to use. That says of all the things I'm spending my energy on, both in my work life and in my home life, you have to think about what are my values, what matters to me, what do I want to really be remembered for? What is my life about? And then in that framework, what am I putting energy into? It might be wonderful stuff, but it doesn't fit. There isn't room for that on my stovetop right now. Maybe there will be another time, but there isn't now. And what am I putting energy into? But I could do it just well enough. It doesn't have to be great. Where can I be just good enough?

Finally, if you do those two things, you eliminate the things that aren't relevant right now, and you let yourself be just good enough at a whole bunch of stuff. Things that really matter, the things that are your greatness, you will have the energy for. Now, this sounds easy, but it's not. And that's what the question is referring to, because when you're in the thick of it, it feels like you have to do it all and you have to do it all really well. And you can't. You simply can't. So you have to speak very firmly to yourself and say, self, what is it that really matters? And what goes into either that medium bucket or the not at all bucket?

Anita Brick: Okay, so there are two questions. And the first one is from an alum. This alum said, he said: “Being mediocre is impossible for me. How do I begin to see the value in being mediocre at some things? And by the way, just writing this out makes me uncomfortable.”

Gail Golden: You know, I think part of this is language, and I use the word mediocre deliberately when I'm trying to really emphasize the point. Many people are more comfortable if they use something like good enough. And what I would challenge as part of that question is I have zero doubt that he or she is already doing many things, just good enough. Nobody is great at everything they do. Nobody, not even Leonardo da Vinci, was great at everything he did. We are doing it already. We have, you know, not doing things full boar already and a great many things. But then we waste energy feeling guilty about it.

Instead of saying, you know what, I'm a mediocre guitar player, which is in fact true for me. I like to play my guitar sometimes. I don't plan on taking lessons. I don't plan on getting any better at it. I just like to play the guitar and sing old songs every once in a while, and I'm okay with it. Now, maybe guitar playing is easy because it's, you know, it's not my profession or anything like that, but there are things in my professional life as well where I'm just good enough. Do I read every article in every professional journal and really think about how should that affect how I work with my clients? No. Do I scan some? Yes. Do I not read some of them at all? Yes. That's kind of good enough as far as I'm concerned. So those are examples of saying this is my choice rather than this is my failure.

Anita Brick: That makes perfect sense to me. It really does. Let's flip to the greatness question. Another alum, she said, I have two questions. How can I embrace and grow my greatness in a challenging situation? And how do I have the proper metric to know that I'm actually making progress?

Gail Golden: Oh. When I think about greatness, I think about three elements that people need to think about. The first is passion. What gives me energy when I do it? I have two words. I think, wow, I love them. So passion is one element. The second one is talent. There are things I love to do that I'm not very good at. It means some things I could learn how to do it. Some things I'm never going to be very good at. To try to make that my greatness is likely going to be an exercise in frustration. I can do it for fun. I can do it mediocre. But I'm never going to be great at that. That's a reality. And I'm not a believer that anybody can do anything, just as long as you want it badly enough.

It's not true. There are things you can't do because you simply don't have the talent for it. So number one is passion, number two is talent. And then the third thing is opportunity. You have to be realistic about the environment that you're in. To a large extent we can make our opportunities. And I'm certainly in favor of that.

But nonetheless there are things you don't have access to. And so when I think about what am I going to be great at at this time in my life, given who I am, given where I am, you know, what am I passionate about? What am I good at, and where are the opportunities for me? Those are the key questions for figuring out what you want to be great at.

Anita Brick: The other part of the question is how do you know if you're making progress?

Gail Golden: That's tough. My gut reaction is it's unique to you. And I think sometimes people who have a highly rigorous education, we think that metrics need to be quantitative. They need to be observable. And that's true in some endeavors. But when you're thinking about am I making progress on my greatness? There are other kinds of metrics in terms of how am I feeling? Or am I meeting more people who are relevant to the path that I am on? There are lots of ways to look at your particular paths and think, what are the changes?

When I start working with a new client, back in the days when I was a therapist, and now when I'm coaching a consultant, I almost always ask them, let's imagine that you and I are sitting together and it's the end of our work together, and we're both feeling very good about what we have accomplished, what will be different? And I get answers. Everything from I'll have a new job to I'll feel more at peace. I'll be able to sleep better at night. I'll be having more fun in my life. Those are all perfectly legitimate measures to use. Asking the question that way, how will I know when I get there? You know, what will have happened to make me feel well, it's that I met the end, but also that I'm making progress along the way? And I think it makes sense to write those things down so that you can look at them from time to time and remind yourself, oh yeah, okay, I did get that done, or I am feeling better about that and it helps you to stay the course.

Anita Brick: I agree, and I think that it's okay to change what those qualitative or quantitative metrics are along the way if what's important to you, in terms of the outcome, changes.

Gail Golden: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Totally makes sense. So too shift gears and an MBA student had a very interesting question. And he said: “For those of us who end up using a lot of emotion in our leadership and passion, finding renewal and managing burnout can be a constant balancing act. Can you share some specific advice with regard to that paradigm? In particular, I'm designing habits that are sustainable and non-robotic. Thank you.”

Well that's a pretty complex question. When you think about the renewal part, are there some specific things–2 or 3 things that someone can begin to do? And I do believe that sometimes it's robotic at the beginning until it becomes more natural. Tabling that part, what are a couple of things that you would recommend that someone does to re-energize, to renew?

Gail Golden: It's a great question. I want to go where you're asking, but I want to do a quick sidestep first, which is to talk about that word burnout for a minute.

Anita Brick: Okay.

Gail Golden: The recipe for burnout is high responsibility, low power. And when you have a lot of responsibility and you don't have the power to actually achieve what you want to achieve, that's the recipe for burnout. Whether you're an entrepreneur working for yourself or somebody working in it within an organization. In general, very senior executives don't suffer from burnout because they've got high responsibility, but they also have high power. Typically, people at the bottom of the ladder who have a narrower job with very clear metrics are less likely to suffer from burnout because they have relatively low responsibility and low power. It's the folks in the middle. They're the ones that are at greater risk for burnout.

So when you look at your own life, if you're feeling burned out, I would encourage you to think about what's going on here. Why is there an imbalance between what I'm feeling responsible for and what I have the power to actually do, and can I get those into alignment? And for many people, including myself, I work a lot. I put a great deal of energy into my work, and I don't feel burned out because I love what I do and I have the power to make things happen in my world. That word burnout. I just wanted to visit that for a minute.

Having said that, when you feel exhausted, when you feel like drained, I got nothing left. A couple of quick things about that. The most productive people–and this comes from work with athletes, top athletes–the most productive people have an energy management system that's called sprint and recover, which means it's not a marathon. It's not about run, run, run, run, run, run, run run, run, run, run until you drop. It's about bursts of energy where you work really hard for a defined period of time, and then you build in breaks for yourself where you step away from the work and do something else that feeds your energy. There's a great book about this. It's called The Power of Full Engagement, and I highly recommend it. I give it to all my clients. Because it talks exactly about that sprint and recover and how to do that. And it talks about the cycles. For example, we have pretty good evidence that you cannot work with full concentration for more than about 90 minutes. If you push yourself past that, the quality of your work will start to suffer. So at least once every 90 minutes, it makes sense to take a brief break, stand up, walk away, get a drink of water, look out the window, go outdoors, do something else, and then come back and the time you lost in that break, you will more than make up for the productivity when you get back.

And then there are bigger breaks. There are taking some time off every week using up all your vacation days. There are all these things that most of us are not very good at. So part of it is managing yourself for that recovery and figuring out how to do that. Then I think your question is asking like what? What would be things to do to recover? It just makes sense again, to step back and reflect and say, when do I feel really good? When do I feel energized? What have I been doing that makes me feel really happy? And it could be anything from, you know, I just cooked a really delicious meal and I'm eating it, if that's your thing. It could be I was just on the phone talking to my friend George, and every time I talk to George, I get energized. It's different for different people, but finding those things that charge your batteries. The notion of rituals, that's useful as a way of building this with some regularity.

Anita Brick: I like that. I think that makes perfect sense. And without those times, I'm not any good to anyone. I remember I was going on vacation and I said to a student, I'll be back, you know, after the first. And he was like, go take the time off. You'll be better for us when you take off that time, which I think is important.

Gail Golden: Right. And again, it's different for different people. I'll tell you, I'm Jewish and I observe the Sabbath. And every Friday at sundown I light candles. And for the next 24 hours I don't work. And whether it's that you take a weekly Sabbath or you take Thursday nights, or you always have lunch on Tuesday with George, the guy who energizes you or whatever it is. Having those rituals is part of how the most productive people continue to be great.

Anita Brick: I like that. There was a question about experimentation. You talk about experimentation, and one of the students said, how do I create a process of experimentation for myself when I have so many demands?

Gail Golden: Okay, I've got all these demands in my life and I want to do the experimentation. What can I do less of to make room for the experimentation process? First of all, does that mean I have to take six months off? Okay, then I have to do that. Maybe it just means that once every two weeks, I attend an event which is about a field entirely different from my own. I just made that up. What would help me experiment, to answer the question that I'm wanting to answer, and what am I willing to do less of to make that happen? And if the answer is there is nothing that I'm willing to do less of then the experimentation is going to have to wait. I can't do it right now.

And there are times in life like that. I mean, when you're a parent of young children and you've got a job that you have to have in order to keep food on the table, and you'd rather your marriage doesn't entirely disintegrate under the pressure of all of those things. And maybe you have aging parents that you're looking after as well. You may not be able to do any experimentation for a while. You just got to keep your head down and get the work done. At other times you can say, yeah, you know, I can do less of this in order to do more of that. But it has to be based in a realistic assessment, that energy is finite, so you can't keep adding more and more stuff to yourself. It's a recipe for feeling like a failure.

Anita Brick: A very good point. And experimentations don't have to be ginormous. They can be tiny little experiments.

Gail Golden: Yep. And I'm going to tell a Gail Golden story for a minute. I mentioned earlier that I hit a point in my career as a therapist when I realized I was getting tired of the work, then the question is, all right, if I'm not going to do this for the rest of my life, what am I going to do? I started out with little experiments. I thought, I value my credential as a psychologist. I value what I know about what makes people tick and how to help them change. But I want to start thinking about different kinds of problems. So I started talking to psychologists who did different kinds of work, psychologists who were working in schools or psychologists who were working in hospitals, psychologists who were working with business leaders, psychologists who were teaching at universities, doing all these other things that I didn't do. I mean, that didn't take vast amounts of time. And it was fun to go for a coffee or a glass of wine with somebody. Out of that, I got really interested in the work that psychologists were doing with business leaders. And so that was then the beginning of the next phase of my exploration, which was, okay, if I want to do that, what do I need to do to get there?

Anita Brick: A much bigger– I wouldn't even call it experiment, I would call it an investment was returning to school in Canada and getting your MBA. But you can make that commitment once you have, for lack of a better word, data based on the tinier experiments.

Gail Golden: That's right. And I'll tell you, you know, the MBA thing. I called up the local business school, which was very fine, one of the best business schools in Canada. And I said, you know, here's the, I'm a psychologist, blah, blah, blah. Do you have some kind of a two-week executive education program where I can sort of learn fundamentals of business? And they said to me, oh, you should enroll in our MBA program. And I laughed because I had treated clients who were in their MBA program. I knew what that program did to people's lives. And I thought, yeah right, that's going to help. But then as I started talking with people, trusted advisors, people who knew me and whom I respected, they said, Gail, that is a really good idea. You should do that. The credential will be valuable to you. It'll give you credibility as a consultant that you're not just a touchy feely psychologist. And you'll learn stuff that you really need to learn. And so I looked at it and I sort of looked at the finances and thought, okay, well, I guess there's a way we could make this work. I took the leap and did it. And I mean, that was a whole other story about how I actually survived two years in business school while also running a full-time psychology practice. But the point is, it was that experimentation that you're talking about, and it started with just a few conversations with colleagues and went forward from there.

Anita Brick: I think that's great. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Gail Golden: I'm all ears if you want to keep going.

Anita Brick: Okay. I like this question and I relate to this question too. An MBA student said: “I am good at discipline as a means of control, but not for creating greater freedom like you talk about in your book. What are a few things I can do to make control and freedom work well together?”

Gail Golden: Yeah, that's the last chapter of my book. It's called “Busting Loose.” One of my observations as a psychologist and as a human being is that nobody can be disciplined about everything all the time. And the risk is that if you try to do that, then you may bust loose in ways that are really destructive. You may really do something that wrecks your life because you have so much pent up sense of constraint. So better than that is giving yourself permission to be what I call a little bit bad. The way I think about this is, you know, there's the wide zone of behavior, which is where I'm being exemplary. I'm doing exactly what I think I should be doing and what I would like other people to do. There is the black zone where I'm doing something that's really destructive and damaging and hurtful. Doing things that are really dangerous.

I don't want to ever go in the black zone. And if I find myself ever in there, I want to get out of it as fast as I can and repair the damage that I've done. In between, it's the gray zone where you do something that's not exemplary, but it's kind of fun and you have enjoyment of it, and then you go back into the white zone again. And I don't want to do that every day. But once in a while, my book is infused with a couple of things. One is giving yourself permission to be who you truly are, and not trying to make yourself into something that you are not. And secondly, flexibility, trying something. If it doesn't work, try something else. Be a little bit bad, then get back into the white zone after that. To me, those are two of the keys for leading a long and good and fulfilling life.

Anita Brick: I believe we need the discipline to give us even the foundation to experiment and to have the freedom to do things. And if they work great, and if they don't work, well, that's good to know. And it felt good to do something a little bit different to see if it fit into who we are and who we want to become. People who are super rigid, as I've seen it, and you've probably seen it more from your work, sometimes the rebellion can be catastrophic.

Gail Golden: Exactly. For me, a life without discipline is a sad life. You don't accomplish very much. You're a slave to your impulses. You won't get much satisfaction out of your life. But a life with only discipline is also a sad life, because it's as you use the word rigid, it's constrained. You got to be able to break out a little bit from time to time.

Anita Brick: Agree, agree. You've given us a lot of really interesting insights. Bringing it all together, if you were advising a client to reset their work life in the midst of a challenging time, what are three things you would be doing beginning right now?

Gail Golden: It depends to me a little bit on whether the reset involves finding a different job, or I want to stay with the same place I'm working, but change the role or change the way I work within my current work setting.

Anita Brick: Go for it. You can share both with us.

Gail Golden: Okay. I want to do something different, but I want to stay within the same environment that I'm in now. So let's say within the same company. The first thing I do, I think, would be to look at who in the company can serve as a mentor and/or a champion for me. Who can help me think about what I'm good at and also put my name forward? If there's an opportunity, who will back me and stick up for me? I think you should be doing that all the time anyway. But particularly when you're looking to make a change. Who in the company can help me get there is the question. The other one, of course, is what do I want? What is it about my role that I would like to change? Do I want more flexibility? Do I want more responsibility, mentors, and champions? What is it I want? And then the third thing is be sure you're doing really excellent work in the role that you're in. Don't slough off. Because if I'm your boss or somebody who's advocating for you and I can say, well, you know, they're kind of mediocre in their current role, it doesn't position you to be considered for opportunities. So those are my three pieces of advice.

If you're staying within the same context. If you're moving, you know you really want to do something different, either a different employer or a whole different field. There are, I think, three tools that you need. And this is beyond figuring it out what you're looking for. One is your resume. It needs to be really sharp. Resume is a sales document that you want to have really good to share with people. And there are wonderful folks out there who can help you sharpen up your resume. Second, you need a very good LinkedIn page. That's really where potential employers and even networkers go to learn about you. So your LinkedIn page needs to be really up to snuff. And again, there are consultants to help you do that. And the third thing is you have to network for the kinds of people who are listening to this conversation, who are alumni of the University of Chicago. You are probably not going to get your next job off an internet site. You are more likely going to get it through connections with people. So take a look at your network and start reaching out to people that you think could help you.

Anita Brick: I love that. On the resume and the LinkedIn side, people who are students and alumni of Booth who are listening, there are lots of resources within Booth to give you a jumpstart on that.

Gail Golden: You guys have a head start for sure.

Anita Brick: Great. Gail, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I'm so glad we were able to make the time.

Gail Golden: Well, thank you for inviting me. I really enjoyed the opportunity to bounce some of these ideas around, and I thank the people who sent in the questions. They were really good and on point, so it's been a pleasure. Thanks again.

Anita Brick: Thank you very much. And Gail has a lot of interesting information on her site which is gailgoldenconsulting.com. Thanks again, Gail.

Gail Golden: My pleasure.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.