Authentic Success

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Where we help you advance in your career. Today we actually have a big bonus today. We have two people here, and they're both at the University of Chicago, so we're very excited about that. First is Karl LaRowe. He is an international speaker, trainer, coach and author. We're going to be talking about the book both of our guests today have written called You Are Good Enough. Karl helps people transform stress and burnout into positive engagement. He received his master's degree from the University of Chicago and is a licensed mental health professional. Karl is based in Malaysia. Ravi Vig is a Singaporean business leader and Chicago Booth MBA who has provided transformational and change leadership to organizations in non profit, private, and public sectors around the globe.

Thank you both. I know it's late at night for you, so thank you both for making yourselves available for Booth students, alumni, and friends at Booth who all listen to this podcast. Now I know with three of us, we may interrupt each other a little bit, but we're going to do our best to have a lively conversation.

So, Ravi, maybe we can start with you from your definition, define authentic success for us.

Ravi Vig: If I look at authentic success at an individual level, or even at a corporate level, it's the success that you achieve when you are in line with your authentic self, your internal KPIs, your internal strengths, and not something which you are pretending, your pseudo self, which is a can't repeat self.

One sort of other good way to look at it is it's not limited to the narrow KPIs, which sometimes are set for you externally, purely based on your true happiness and sustainability. In business terms, that would be your competitive advantage, which is sort of manifested outside leading to your authentic success.

Anita Brick: Okay, great, Karl, one of the students asked, “I get that this is important. In practical and actionable terms how does a person create authentic success?”

Karl LaRowe: Well, this is something that I actually had to discover in my life. So let me just share a little bit of what I did and how I came to realize that I was not experiencing authentic success and some of the steps that I took right after I graduated from the University of Chicago. I got a job with one of the top hospitals in Portland, Oregon. Wow. I've really made it. I've got this top job, top position, great pay, but I found that I really didn't like doing emergency room psychology that much. And over a period of years I began to burnout. But I couldn't let go of this idea of being in this high prestige, high paying position. And finally, I burned out and developed depression and had to leave.

I had to really get very honest with myself. At some point, I had to look inside myself and say, hey, what's really going on here? What's happening with you? Who are you really? What is it that you really want out of your life and of your career? And that's when I began to develop this idea of self honesty.

And this is actually a first principle in the book, and that's how we really look inside of ourselves and see who we really are. That's the authentic self. One of the ways that we can begin to do this is what we call mindful self reflection, and that is spending a little bit of time each day relaxing, going inside, being with yourself, noticing what you're feeling, what you're thinking, and the conversations you're having with yourself, and being as open and honest and transparent with yourself as you can. The counterfeit self only thrives when we are feeding this idea of I've got to be what other people expect me to be. I've got to maintain this image. That's the counterfeit self. And if we want to begin to lead ourselves away from that into this authentic feeling, this authentic success, then I've really got to begin to get down inside myself and be honest with who I am.

Anita Brick: All right. How does this translate into authentic purpose, which really is the driver or compass for our lives? Our careers and our lives in general? What is it that a person can do to listen for and even experiment with what might be an authentic purpose?

Karl LaRowe: That's a really good question, because our sense of purpose comes from deep within us. It's that voice inside of us. The way I begin to listen to that is by letting go of the image of who I think I am supposed to be, because if I keep letting that image chatter in my mind all the things I'm supposed to accomplish and the person I'm supposed to be, I won't listen to what's going on inside of me. It's sort of like listening to your heart, listening to your intuition. Authentic purpose comes from the authentic self.

Anita Brick: And this sounds great. It seems a little removed from reality though for me. Ravi, I would love to ask you, this came from a student, this may take you back to when you were at Booth. The student said, “I am worried if I focus on who I am, the critical self-reflection that Karl was talking about, versus what I do and contribute to this approach, it could leave me without a career. Can you please give me a little bit of advice about how to resolve this conflict, and it needs to be practical for me.”

Ravi Vig: First, who you are versus what you do. Both of them needs to be focused on. So what happens is, you know, when we are focusing on what we do, you know, it's very natural that you would lack the skills you would have to learn on your job. That's very normal. But what happens is sometimes we try to spill that over to our authentic selves. So if I don't know a certain thing at work, I get a sense of feeling that I'm not good enough, and that's where it becomes messy, I would say. It's very normal to sort of look at what you do. It's fine to not know something and improve on that, versus knowing that as a human being, you are good enough from day one. You know, in fact, having that feeling of good enoughness would actually open up, you know, your mindset to failures and look at it in a different way and knowing that I need to get better at something. Right, but that doesn't mean that I am not good enough as a human being. I'm not good enough in my authentic self. So I hope that answers the question.

Anita Brick: It's getting us there. So let's follow along with this. And Karl, there was another student who said, “My thoughts clearly skew towards the negative. This is absolutely the case. One big thing is that I compare myself to others either as better than or less than. Can you give me a couple of ideas of how to begin to break that pattern?”

Karl LaRowe: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, it's normal. We tend to have a lot more negative thoughts than positive thoughts and positive psychology. They've measured that we have around 50,000 thoughts a day and about 80% of those are negative. So we're really influenced by that negativity bias. So the thing to begin to do is, one, to notice the nature of those thoughts as you’re beginning to have them. Relax and let them go and not give them so much attention and, rather, begin to replace them with some positive supporting thoughts. So it's a matter of identifying the pattern of negative thought and beginning to replace that with a more self compassionate way of relating to ourselves.

Anita Brick: All very interesting. The next one I will fully admit I struggle with. A friend of Booth, not a student or alum, but a friend of Booth said, “What is the difference between being right and being wrong?”

Ravi Vig: Being correct is essentially that if you imagine there's a challenge or a problem out there, the correct answer, the correct approach to that would essentially solve that problem. In business terms I would say that's a little bit of inside out and outside in. You know what the market needs. And you also know what people say, your competitive advantage as an organization or as an individual are right. I mean, so you match it and you come up with a correct answer. Of course, and I'm imagining, I think, when the individual uses that term of being right, that is more towards your urge, your need to be right, especially. You don't care so much about if that answer would solve that specific issue, but it's more of your internal satisfaction and usually comes when you are driven by your quantified self.

Because then you have this mode where you feel a need to defend your quantified self and you're not open. If you're not open, anything that goes against you, no matter how right that is, would actually challenge you, and then you would have that need to be right. In very practical terms, I would say that being correct, you know, as a leader, as a sort of and as a management it is really important because in the end you're measured by the success of an organization, as an individual, rather than being right. In fact, I would go to an extent of saying that I personally sometimes prefer, if I'm sitting in an audience of ten people and trying to come up with a solution, I would prefer that I am wrong in a specific answer or an approach. Because then, you know, it's just you who needs to change rather than, you know, changing the other eight, nine people in the room.

Karl LaRowe: I would say that the need to be right is one of our most defended intentions. People would rather be right than be happy, and we have our egos so built around being right that I am right, and it's more than just having the right answer, it’s the sense of my point of view, my perception is the one and only true perception. And when I take that stand, I completely negate everyone else's perception. This really becomes the centerpiece of conflict, and interpersonal struggle can lead it down to in most cases, there's tremendous need to be right because it's our ego. 

Anita Brick: You're absolutely, not to like play around with this word, but you're absolutely correct, at least in my experience. When someone wants to be right, there's no listening and there's no dialog taking place.

Karl LaRowe: Exactly, and it becomes a real fixed position. I can't move from that position because it feels like I'm losing something of myself because I have identified with that position. So it's not just something I'm doing, it's something that I am being. It’s something that is a reflection of me, that becomes a major focus point in, I would say, 80% of the interpersonal difficulties within an organization or within a relationship.

Anita Brick: Very, very good point. So here's a follow up question by an alum. She said, “How can a person not get defensive when treated as inferior or in a dismissive way?”

Karl LaRowe: First of all, I would say to that person, don't feel badly about feeling badly. It's natural. If we're feeling dismissed by somebody, it's a natural reaction to feel badly. But here's the situation: When I begin to accept myself as I am, when I'm beginning to develop this sense of being good enough for who I am, I am not as hurt by somebody dismissing me or dismissing my behavior. When I know I'm good enough, somebody cannot put me down. They can't tell me that there's anything wrong or bad or flawed about me. I've come to accept myself as I am. What will help take the sting out of that kind of feeling of that person dismissing me is by learning to embrace and accept that who I am is always good enough, even though maybe what I'm doing isn't good enough. And that's the real big difference. We need to accept our enoughness as being part of who we are, while at the same time knowing that I always have room to grow.

They can't really put me down. They're not in a position to evaluate myself as a person, only I am. They can certainly make comments about my behavior or my performance, and I can learn that, but my value is up to me.

Anita Brick: Excellent point, excellent point. Ravi, there was another Boothie who said, “You talk about how people start with a sense of adventure in their career. I don't have it now and never have. How do I find it?” 

Ravi Vig: Yeah, first of all, kudos to that student. Most people would realize that, unfortunately, you know, on their deathbed when they look back and they have regrets, right? So I'll say that again, I think this is a fantastic start. You know, my advice will be you're starting your career. Of course, sometimes you would want to quickly get on board and start getting your paycheck and start getting your experience looking at the real world, and that's totally fine. When you move forward, slowly start getting comfortable with your authentic self and start expanding your KPI's to bring a flavor of you.

You want to create something in this world, you could be an entrepreneur. You want to become a leader. You want to lead a change that tells you that you're not going to be in the general management site you want to give. That means profit is something which will give you that passion that you don't have to start on day one with your passion. Sometimes you may want to take that risk, but I think the approach I'm suggesting is very much to do with risk management living in a practical world. So while you sort of proceed, expand your KPIs as your parameters and slowly get into the more that you are getting that passion. I'm speaking from a very practical example, where, you know, I have worked around 4 to 5 industries because my focus has been on building something new, turning around organizations and setting something up. So that has taken me across 4 or 5 industries, even sectors from public sector, private sector, nonprofit, to seek my passion on that.

Anita Brick: I would say myself too. I started in banking, never thought higher. It wasn't even on the radar. Part of it is learning more about what's important to us in a broader sense that helps us get there, but the adventure part I think of, that's not necessarily the same as passion to me, adventure and staying in that mode or reactivating that mode have a lot to do with curiosity. What do you guys think?

Karl LaRowe: I think that sense of adventure comes from our authenticity, our authentic self. I think we are born with a lot more adventure than we end up having as adults. I think if you look at young children, you see life is an adventure to them and that it's how we capture and retain that sense of fascination for life, a sense of wanting to explore and stretch out that sense of adventure.

Anita Brick: How do you keep it?

Well, the sense of adventure also comes from knowing your strengths. And this is, again, out of this psychology, our strengths, our natural capacities that we have inside of us, that we are born with, they’re natural there within us. Knowing your strengths, knowing who you are unleashes this sense of adventure. This is who I am. This is what I want to do. This is how I want to grow and experience my life.

Ravi Vig: Speaking from a practical sort of personal angle, one way to inject that adventure you may want to change a variable at a time. So on one hand you are managing your risk, but you are bringing a new component. As I did mention, you may want to change the industry. You may want to change the sector, but keep some of the skills like, you know, a leader in a nonprofit versus a leadership role in profit would have common ground to it. You may want to change geography, you know, moving from Latin America, to Asia Pacific, to Europe. That brings you a sense of change and adventure.

Now, the only thing I would say as a caveat is that you may fail at what you do, but not who you are. If these changes and this adventure is coming from your authentic self, you should take that failure as an adventure. Rather than saying, well, I'm not good enough.

Anita Brick: I think that's a really good point. I hang out with a group of people who I mean, I'm not saying that they like setbacks and failure, but when they experience it, they're like, oh wow, that's fuel for growth. In fact, there was a student last week who was doing an internship this summer and it wasn't going the way he expected. In fact, he got pretty flattened in a meeting, and so we talked to him on the phone. You know, we brainstormed, gave him ideas of what he could do to add value and still make a contribution.

In the weeks that were left, I usually put everything in the email, I sent it back to him and his response was fabulous. And his response was, you know, I really think that this is a great opportunity. I'm actually looking at this as a really cool problem to solve, and the people around him at the company where he is this summer, thought he was a little bit crazy because they're like, don't you see that this isn't working out so well? But from his point of view, I think it really came more from, what Karl talks about, a growth mindset. He was enlivened by this pretty overwhelming challenge where the people around him were like, this is not good, and I like the fact that he looked at that challenge as an opportunity for him to grow, for sure, but for him to add something different and maybe even better than what the company expected.

Ravi Vig: Exactly.

Karl LaRowe: That's a nice story. That's somebody with a good sense of resilience about themselves to be able to do that.

Anita Brick: Absolutely. So there was another question I think came from a student and he said, “Can you please share with me how to incorporate, which you talked about in the book, a sense of responsibility and appreciation in Building Authentic success?” Both. Feel free to share it.

Karl LaRowe: That's a very insightful question, by the way, and the sense of how do I utilize the sense of responsibility to build an authentic success? Accepting personal responsibility is actually our second principle of transformation, and it's crucial. Rather than accepting blame, what I need to do is to accept ownership from my own thoughts and my feelings in my behavior, and where my life is as it exists today. Sense of ownership. Being able to do that means that I've got to not blame myself. I've got to accept things and accept myself as I am. Personal responsibility and accepting personal responsibility really is one of the key transformational principles in developing authentic success.

Anita Brick: Now, where does the appreciation part come in?

Ravi Vig: Appreciation, I think, is one of the most powerful positive emotions. I couldn't help thinking of the book Positivity by Doctor Barbara Fredrickson. There is an appreciation that opens up your mind to sort of new ideas. As soon as you do that again, and sort of relating back to our topic, what you see is you are putting aside your urge to be right. I think we just spoke about that.

You're opening up to new ideas, to new learning, to new solutions. Of course, you're embracing more, getting more ideas into it from an organization standpoint, from an individual standpoint. As soon as you do that, you are bound to succeed. I think there's a higher probability of doing that. You are open to being wrong. Someone else comes up with a correct solution. It doesn't have to be you. As soon as you start appreciating someone else's work, someone else's ideas, you know you definitely have a better way forward on that.

Karl LaRowe: I just wanted to add to that a little bit, because you hit it right on the head there. Appreciation is one of our most powerful positive emotions and this is what Doctor Barbara Fredrickson was talking about in her book, Positivity, that the more we can experience emotions like appreciation, it literally changes. Our mindset changes our perception, changes the way we see ourselves and see others. When I start to really have a sense of appreciation for myself in others, it really changes how I see myself in my life and see other people. It widens our point of view, gives us more creativity and other positive mental attributes. And from my own perception, I mean from my own experience, I can tell you that the more positive that I've begun to feel in my life, that appreciation, the sense of appreciation is one of the most powerful emotions that we can utilize. 

Anita Brick: I totally agree. Do you guys have time for one more question?

Ravi Vig: Sure.

Karl LaRowe: Certainly. 

Anita Brick: Okay, so when you think about it in very practical, tangible, actionable term, what are a couple of things that each of you could share to give advice for someone who wants to increase the level of authentic success?

Karl LaRowe: Beginning today, one of the things is to really learn to know what our strengths are. We've become so negatively focused in our lives, we don't even realize it. In fact, the research shows that it tends to be about 80% negative to 20% positive in our thinking, in our emotions. And we really need to change that around. And so as we begin to focus on our strengths, and this is one of the core tenets of positive psychology, I begin to do better, feel better about myself.

In fact, one of the things in positive psychology is to SOAR and not SWOT, everyone's familiar with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Instead, focus on SOAR, what stands for strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and resolve. So rather than focus on the negative, rather than trying to bring my weaknesses up, which is what we're taught to do, we get so much more for our time and energy by identifying our strengths and improving those. And there's a couple of places that people can actually go to discover what their strengths are. There's a couple of tests online, and one of those tests is called the Virtues in Action Via Character Strengths. And it's at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology website. It's about a 240 question survey, so it takes a little while to do, but at the end it'll give you a list of your top strengths.

I did it, and mine are creativity, love of learning, persistence, and capacity to love and be loved. What I've done is utilize my strengths, which is creativity in my work. I absolutely love it. I never get tired of it. I've been doing it for the last 25 years and it never gets boring for me. Discover what your strengths are and learn to utilize the strengths. The second one is called the Clifton Strengths Finders test, by the way. And that's the Gallup Organization. Begin to discover what you're really good at, what excites you, what passions you, and develop your strengths rather than focus on improving your weaknesses.

Anita Brick: Do you have a second one?

Karl LaRowe: Learn to be more compassionate with yourself. It's incredible how hard we are on ourselves. If you really listen to the conversations that you have inside your own mind, they tend to be very negative. We tend to be very harsh and judgmental with ourselves. Learn to be kind and accepting. Learn to have more positive self-talk inside yourself. Learn to forgive yourself for being a human being.

In fact, there's a website called Self-compassion.org by Doctor Kirsten Neff, and she's done a lot of research on the benefits of self-compassion. She has found that the more we are accepting and compassionate and forgiving and appreciating of ourselves, the more resilience, inner resilience and strength that we develop.

Anita Brick: Great. Thank you. Ravi. Anything you'd like to add?

Ravi Vig: Let me pick a very practical one and then maybe a little philosophical one too, you know, and this great discussion. I think the first one is that sometimes we tend to see that if 1,995% of the people around you are doing something that has to be right. One suggestion would be to challenge your KPIs because unfortunately, when it comes to this, your authentic self being a kind of itself at a very early age, you know, even from the parents, your teachers, your schools, the KPIs that are set around you push you in a very wrong direction.

Of course, nowadays even education system schools are changing around it, but it's going to take some time. Going out for your grades, excelling in your school, your sports, at a corporate level, you know, focusing on your EPS earnings per share, your market standing, and even at an economy level, right. I mean, your GDP, these are very narrow KPIs. So my suggestion would be to look at your KPIs. You know, I earlier mentioned to throw in some of your adventure and passion related parameters to sort of make sure that it keeps you closer to your authentic self.

So that's one second. And again, it's a little philosophical, but you know, after this call, people would have at least a few minutes to think about it. Sometimes what happens is, you know, if you're running a race, a 100 meter dash or a marathon, you get to see the end of it, learn from it. You could give some answers to it and then you walk away happy and with some justification and some details. Unfortunately, in life you don't get that chance. You don't get to go outside and look in and look at the whole opportunity cost of what you're losing. When that happens, you are pushed towards your kind of beat self.

You know, you think that you can make a lot of money, have a powerful status. One day I will get a chance to look at my health, look at my family, and, no matter how much, you know that you need to be happy, you need to spend time with your family. And I think 99%, if not 100% of people will know that. But do you think that there will be a special day and occasion to do that? As we have studied in the book with the regrets of the dying, people get a chance to look back, and that's when they say, I wish I would have followed my authentic self.

My suggestion there again, is a very philosophical way, but step out of yourself, you know, be it at night or what, switch it off and you look at yourself. What are you trying to achieve in a day? What are you trying to achieve in a week, in a month in your life? And that would give you a perspective of where you're heading, your happiness versus your success, and you know, the other parameters that are making you run. So it's always good to stop, to look inwards more. I would stay intensive, experienced, and extensive. Stop running from all of these, you know, other materialistic things. And yeah, so that would be my suggestion. I mean, look long term, step outside and look at yourself. And the first one being looking at your KPIs and challenging it as you move forward.

Anita Brick: Great. You know, it sounds like our whole conversation today is really finding this balance between the conspicuous benefits that we see and also looking for the inward ones, the inconspicuous ones that sometimes aren't even obvious until many years when we start having this change in people who haven't seen us for a while. Something's different about you. You're, like Karl was talking about, you’re more compassionate. Ravi, like you were talking about, you seem more adventurous about what you're doing, and I really like that in use. Not one excluding the other. It's really both of them. And thank you for bringing that multifaceted perspective to the book and to our conversation today.

Karl LaRowe: Thank you very much for having us. Really appreciate it.

Anita Brick: Thank you, thank you, thank you. One thing, there's a lot of really good stuff on website, stuff about the book and many other things, and it is thestressofsuccess.com. Thank you again Karl. Thank you again Ravi.

Karl LaRowe: This was a wonderful conversation.

Ravi Vig: Thank you Anita.

Anita Brick: Very very welcome. It was our pleasure, and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Burke with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.