Adam Galinsky
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and he understood that. And one of the reasons why he gave them this task of digging, I think he gave it for two reasons. One is to fill the day, to give them something to focus on so their minds wouldn't fracture under the pressure and the panic, but also to give them a sense of working together as a team. They were a team. They were a soccer team.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So they knew how to work together. And so he created the sense of camaraderie, the sense of working together. And that prevented two things from happening, like mental breakdown, but also interpersonal breakdown. It really prevented conflicts of emerging within the team because they were working together as a team.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that he instinctively knew and understood that we all need structure for our days. This is something that NASA astronauts have known for a long time that when you're in space, they have them on a incredibly strict schedule. And so he understood, like, we're going to have a structure to the day. We're going to get up at six every day.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
We're going to dig, you know, until we're, you know, exhausted. And then we're going to sleep and then we're going to get up and we're going to dig again. Now, there's something really important to remember is they went into this cave with no food. They didn't have a single morsel of food on them when they went in. They went in this cave with no water. They didn't have any water.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Now, they did actually end up having some water. And that's also something really remarkable about Coach Eck is that he understood they couldn't drink the muddy water that was surging around them. But there was water dripping through the roof. And he understood that because it was going through the mountain stones, it was essentially being cleaned.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And so they were able to get water and give them that little bit of at least that type of nourishment that they needed.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. He was, in some ways, an incredible mentor, understanding the individual needs. The smallest member of the group, he constantly encouraged him, saying, I know you can do it. You're strong. I believe in you. He would sing with them, right, to help lift their mood. But he would also meditate with them to help keep them calm.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And I think the meditation is a particularly interesting one for two reasons. First, at some point in this time— the oxygen levels in the cave were getting dangerously low. In fact, they fell probably below life-affirming levels at certain points, and they still survived. And part of it was by doing this meditation, he was helping them conserve energy, but also use the oxygen more efficiently.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They weren't sure, but they thought they heard almost like a bubble come out of the water and the word, hello. And they were up on this ledge. The water had receded a little bit. And so they immediately kind of went down off the ledge towards where the water was. And they turned on their flashlights. And there, miraculously, were two British divers who had spent 10 days trying to get in there.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They had been there alone, without food, without water, without a way to call for help, without warmth. for 10 days, and they had been miraculously found.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Well, the divers say they were horrified at how they looked, right? They looked so emaciated, right? You could see the effect of 10 days of no food combined with all the effort they'd put into digging. they were even more amazed by the demeanor of the soccer players. There wasn't a single trembling lip, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They smiled, they seemed happy to see them, and they just were shocked that here was a group of people who'd suffered, in some ways, the most horrific deprivation possible, but that deprivation did not show on their facial expressions.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He reassured them that the boys were going to be okay, that they were okay, that he was looking out for them. He also apologized for what happened. But he basically said, I'm with the boys. I'm taking care of them. They're going to be okay. You're going to see them soon. I'm very sorry for what you've gone through.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, I mean, I think he understood that everything that he said was going to have a huge impact on the boys. And so he was very, very careful in a number of different ways. First, he never used words like trapped, right? He never used words like stuck, right? He never emphasized that they were in a perilous state.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Um, he always, um, another thing that he did is that he understood that his strength was their strength. And sometimes he got overwhelmed and he, he needed to cry. He needed to let us motions, but he, he understood that it was really critical for him to do that privately where they couldn't see it when they were sleeping, for example, because they knew if they saw him cry.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
it would break them and they would sort of lose sort of essentially all hope. So he understood that he had to focus. He, you know, understood that they needed a shared goal and that they really truly believed that they were working towards a real possibility. So he said, we're going to dig our way out and we're going to work towards that. And when they would say, you know, how much longer?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He would say just a little longer, right? It was always we're making progress. We're getting there. Another thing he did was that he helped them craft a whole story about what was on the other side of their digging. So he created a story about an orange field that they would come out and there would be oranges right there that they could eat.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And they had that at the end of the orange field, there was a little store and they would go in and they would get as much food and drink as they could possibly do. And then they would go back and they would get their bikes and they would ride home as if no one was looking at them for the last 10 days. And so these three things, like very careful with his language, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Never talking about being trapped or stuck. Very careful about what he expressed emotionally so that he portrayed calmness and strength and optimism and hope. And then even not only giving them shared goal of digging their way out, but giving them what that shared goal was going to lead to. The Elysian Fields on the other side of the cave that they were working towards.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It was almost 30 feet below the surface, so the captain, Francesco Schettino, couldn't see it, but it just tore a gigantic hole in the bottom of the ship, basically rendering the ship inoperable.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, we've found, for example, that in negotiations, we can think about what we're trying to avoid or prevent in the negotiation, or we could think about what is their hope, their ideal outcome is in the negotiation. If you get them really focused on that, it has this transformative effect on how they approach the negotiation. They become more optimistic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They become more assertive, but in a positive way, not in a sort of aggressive way. and they become more persistent. And because of that, they end up getting better outcomes.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. And I will say one thing, it actually would have been impossible for them to dig because once they were discovered and we knew their exact location, one of the original ideas for getting them out was to drill a hole into the cave. But the rock was too thick and it was impossible to get to them. So their digging would eventually come up against shore rock.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But we've known for a century of research that Having a shared goal is unbelievably critical for helping any group stay together. A shared goal is critical for reducing conflict and helping cohesion.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, he had a very tragic childhood, Coach Eck. brother passed away, and his brother's loss literally broke the heart of his mom. And then she passed away, and then his dad passed away, and now he's an orphan. He was sent to a Buddhist monastery. And in this Buddhist monastery, he was trained to be a Buddhist. And for nine years, he ate one meal a day. Right. That's all he did.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And that became actually a critical story in the cave because they would be like, I'm hungry. He says, I know you're hungry, but your body can go much longer than you think it can without food. And so he could tell his own story from his own experience of like, I've survived with little food. I know that you can survive with little food.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Now, it also, being a Buddhist, taught him the art of meditation, the art of remaining calm, the art of accepting the situations where we find ourselves. There's a phrase that I learned recently, which I really, really like, is we can't control the wind, but we can control how we use our sails. And I think Kojak is a great example of that. It's a very Buddhist thing, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. It had a complete loss of power. There was a blackout that was involved. And basically, at that moment in time, this was essentially a shipwreck.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Like we can't control the world around us, but we can control our reaction to the world and how we function within the constraints that we face.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, we asked them to think about a time when they had power, when they were in control of a situation. We had them to reflect on what it was like to have that power, to be in control. After that, we told them they were actually going to write an application for a job. We gave them a real job ad that existed. And we said, write a cover letter for this job. And everyone did that.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And I should tell you that we had two groups of students or two groups of participants, I should say, in this particular study. Half the people were asked to think about a time when they were in control, when they had power. But the other half were asked to think about a time when they weren't in control, when they didn't have power. They were a low power person. They were dependent on others.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And so what we're able to do is by manipulating or varying whether they focused on a time when they were in control or not in control, we could see how reflecting on that positive type of experience would affect how they did in their job applications.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. And what's interesting about the study is every single person in the study had moments in their life when they had power and when they didn't have power. And so it was easy for them to reflect on those experiences with that because it's extraordinarily effective at changing people's psychological orientations.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, I think what it does is it really puts us in this psychological mindset where we just look at the world in a different way. We approach the world in a different way. In the study with Yoris, what we did is we did so many different analyses of these different job applications and try to understand how how they differed. And they didn't differ in a ton of different dimensions.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They didn't differ in how positive or negative they were, for example. But the one thing they differed in is that people could really feel a higher level of sort of confidence or self-efficacy that was coming from the people that thought about a time when they had power. And
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
One of the things that we've shown in our research over and over again is that recalling those experiences of being in control of having power really does make people more optimistic, right? And we already talked about how important optimism was for Coach Eck in that example. We've shown in our research that it makes people feel more connected to their true self, makes them feel more authentic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
That's not what happened at all. In fact, he did not alert the authorities immediately. In fact, he spent a considerable amount of time trying to go into crisis management mode, figure out how he was going to protect his own reputation and come up with a story that wouldn't place the responsibility on himself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And we've actually shown in research, not ourselves, but some colleagues in Europe did some research where they told people they're going to now be videotaped and have to give a speech, which is an incredibly stressful experience for people. And why they did this, they actually had them hooked up to electrical connectors to measure their physiological responses.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I mean, what they showed is that simply recalling a time when you had power, when you're in control, made people feel more in control, right? And their physiological arousal literally went down.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Well, she described it that she honestly thought that she'd had a mid-air collision. She felt like a Mack truck or another plane had just driven right into her. And she immediately knew after she felt this jolt that something was wrong because all of a sudden the cabin pressure was going thing. She realized they were losing oxygen very quickly.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And she realized immediately this was going to be unlike any other flight she'd ever taken. What exactly had happened, Adam? What had happened to the plane? So what happened was their left engine had experienced catastrophic failure. It essentially exploded.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And when it exploded, not only did they lose that engine, it's a double-engine plane, they could have flown with the other engine, but the explosion tore a hole in the side of the plane.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He tried to come up with a story to say that rather than the sudden blackout, which was caused obviously by the accident and the water rushing in, was actually the result of the accident rather than vice versa. And his primary concern was, how am I going to protect myself? And he didn't spend any energy thinking about how he was going to protect the passengers.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It was absolute chaos. So first of all, very tragically, one of the passengers who was sitting next to that hole was sucked into that hole. She didn't get sucked all the way out, but her injuries were fatal. Everyone began to panic. People were frantically trying to get on wifi to write to their family and friends saying, I may never see you again. I love you.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
The flight attendants were panicking. You know, all of this was, it was just, yeah, pure chaos.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. One of the things that she realized immediately is they needed to dissent. They need to send for lots of different reasons. One is the plane wanted to descend, so they wanted to do what the plane wanted to do. But also, obviously, oxygen was a big issue and the air pressure that was happening.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And so they were actually doing what looked like a very fast descent, but was actually a controlled descent. And at a certain point, I think she realized the panic of the passengers was how they might be interpreting that dissent. And I think maybe the most remarkable thing that she did that entire day is she went on the loudspeaker and announced to everyone 10 words.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
People will talk about those 10 words as being the 10 most important words they heard in their life. And those 10 words were, we are not going down, we're going to Philadelphia. And so that 10 words let them know that there was a plan, that the going down was not chaos. You know, it was not a precipitous fall. It was an orchestrated descent.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And people have said, you know, those 10 words literally churned the plane from panic to possibility.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
the plane is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. She turns the plane and it doesn't turn. And she's so beflummoxed by this, she actually says out loud, and you can hear it in the recorder, Heavenly Father. She's looking for guidance. And she finally decides to take a slightly risky move, I think with the rudder, and it turns at the last minute just in time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, every step that she did was remarkable. She lands, she gets it so that the fire trucks are on the left side where the exploded engine was in case there's a fire. She also does something else which is really amazing. She recognizes some of these passengers might just try to get out of the plane as fast as they can.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And so she actually churned the flaps of the wings down to give people a little bit of a slide if they were going to try to do that. And so she was taking their perspective of a panic passenger and what they might try to do as soon as the plane lands.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, so this was not an uncommon thing for Tammy Jo, that when they had delays, she would often go back into the cabin, talk to the passengers. But this time, she went row by row, deliberately talking to each and every passenger, making sure they're OK. She came to a little girl. And this little girl was pretty freaked out.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And she said, you got to do something no one else has ever done before on any of my planes. And as her parents said, she made our daughter feel special. And what's so funny is Tammy Jo... talks about her voyage down the cabin.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And she says that she actually was shocked afterwards that more people, more reporters, more people talked about that walk down the aisle and meeting and greeting each of the passengers to make sure they're okay, then talked about how she landed this crippled flight.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And it shows how, in some ways, how starved we are for leaders who are compassionate and really connect to the people that they're leading.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. I mean, and she was so incredible that when she was checked out by medical personnel afterwards, one of them asked her a question that totally confused her. He said, how did you get through security? And she's like, what are you talking about? He's like, how did you get through security with your nerves of steel? He says, I'm taking your vitals right now and you're completely calm.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Like, your blood pressure's fine, your arousal's fine, your heart rate is normal. Like, how is that possible? And we heard that in her voice, the calmness in her voice, which is what was needed at that moment in time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He did not. At the time that the Coast Guard was communicating with Chatino about the rescue, he was already himself in a lifeboat. And he claimed that he did not intend to be in a lifeboat, that he fell and stumbled accidentally into the lifeboat. So while everyone else was on board and panicking, Captain Chatino was safely in a lifeboat off of the ship.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, absolutely. So in general, our psychological states are contagious to other people. But that gets they become truly the word that you just use infectious when we're leaders. And, you know, I've coined a phrase I call the leader amplification effect. And the idea that when we're leaders, all of our words, gestures, interactions, even our silences, right, become amplified.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
and that leads to intensified reactions. And so what we do as a leader really, really matters so much. And there's a coda to the story about Tammy Jo Schultz that really takes into account this idea of the behavior of leaders matter. They told her she could take as much time that she wanted off and she could come back whenever she wanted to. She was back flying a few weeks later.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
She said she partially did it for herself to return to normalcy, but she also did it for other people to show that she had confidence and faith in Southwest Airlines. And that she had confidence in flight and to not let any conspiracies start to emerge, essentially what she said. So she understood that her actions were going to have an impact on other people. She was a leader on that plane.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But now because of her action, she was a leader more broadly in the world. And she really understood her role, which is exactly what Captain Schettino did not understand.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, and I think one of the reasons why these leaders are so remarkable is because they combine two elements that often don't go together in the powerful. One element is this sort of courageous, agentic, self-assured, self-efficacious person, but the other is a person that looks out for others. It really elevates them into the realm of an inspiring leader.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Sometimes wire mesh leaders can be very effective when they're trying to get people to, you know, coordinate the behavior or to go towards a particular course of action. But most of us need some terry cloth guidance, right? And you think about a pilot, right? A pilot is someone who has a task to do, which is to take passengers safely from point A to point B. But they're not just an aviator, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They're also a protector of those people. And they need to take into account their psychological states and what they need in order to be in a better place at any moment in time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
A key theme, I think, of inspiring leaders is that they reflect on their experiences and they think about the times when they did things well and they try to build off those. But they also think about the times when they didn't do things as well and they try to recover from those. I can tell you, just as one experience that I had is, I had a father who was prone to vicious bursts of rage.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Like he'd spill milk and his whole body would tense up and he would explode. And early on when I was a parent with these two little kids, they would do something and it really felt like my dad had taken over my body and I would just explode. And I could immediately see the reaction in my child. I mean, he would go into a state of crying that was like, just an abject state of fear.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I trained myself over time to never have that reaction again. I probably had it a dozen times. He would go into a fugue state of crying as if he was in an altered state, like I had shocked his system so bad. I realized I could never do that again. I've trained myself. The other day, my son was really upset that we were going out and I just sat there with them and I was like, I know it's so hard.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I want to be with you too, you know, and I love you so much. You know, I didn't react to his anger, his tears, his frustration. I was able to be there. And, you know, every time I did it, it got easier the next time I did it. I was creating a habit, a practice of being empathic in there.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And that's the key theme, I think, of Inspire that I think that I most want people to take away, which is that we can all learn to be more inspiring. We can all learn through reflection, through commitments, and through practice.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. That's exactly what he claimed. He said that he stumbled and fell and actually slipped into the lifeboat. And now once he's in the lifeboat, there's no real reason to get off the lifeboat because he can, quote, organize the rescue from there.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Well, the Coast Guard was furious that he was in the lifeboat, and they were demanding that he climb back up. And they gave him very specific orders. Climb back up. Tell me how many people are on board. Tell me how many women are on board, how many children are on board. Gave him very clear instructions.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And Chatino kept giving sort of mumbled answers about why he couldn't possibly go back on board. And eventually he just stopped climbing. responding to the Coast Guard member. And you could see, you could hear in the Coast Guard member's voice, his fury and infuriation just consuming him. And at one point he was so furious, Ascettino, that he yelled, I will get you for this.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So if you were in the lifeboat and you were there with Schettino, you would not know that he was the captain of the ship because somehow in the course of this panic state where everyone is running around trying to save their lives, he managed to change out of his captain's uniform into his civilian clothing before he, of course, stumbled and accidentally fell into the lifeboat.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It was a disaster. I mean, 32 members of the passengers passed away, perished, lost their lives because of this. And when we look back at it, it's very clear that
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
As soon as the damage was done, as soon as the Costa Concordia had hit this reef, if Francesco Schettino had immediately called the Coast Guard, had immediately come clean, had immediately set up a process of rescue, it's very likely that every single passenger would have survived and with no injuries.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Captain Francesco Schettino claims that he went closer to shore in order to salute mariners who were on the shore. The prosecutors, on the other hand, claim that he had a more nefarious motive or a more lascivious motive, which is his mistress, a dancer, was also on board. And they suggest he was trying to impress her with his captainship.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He was. So I mentioned the Coast Guard said, I will make you pay for this. And he was made to pay for it. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for a variety of different counts, including abandoning a ship, but also manslaughter. But I think what's most interesting about the court case is that at no point would he take any responsibility.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And he said, essentially, it's not my responsibility what happened.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I mean, I think the first thing he was, you know, focused on the wrong details, right? So he was focused on the story that he could tell about how this event happened, why there was this electrical blackout. et cetera, in order to, in some ways, save his own reputation, he missed the larger picture, the bigger picture, which was now this boat was flooding water.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Eventually, it was going to capsize, and that was going to lead to potentially passengers' loss of life, which it did. And if he had immediately understood, okay, the boat's been injured. It doesn't matter how it got injured at this point. The only thing that matters is how do we get everyone off board as quickly as possible?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And so he, I mean, the first mistake he made, right, was he was focused on the wrong thing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he tried to blame it on the helmsman, for example, and blame other people. And so it was a classic example of deny responsibility. It's not my fault. But the basic fundamental error he made was he was in a leadership role. He was a protector and steward of a group of people, but he was only focused on himself and what he could do to protect himself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And in doing so, he essentially abandoned his duty as a leader, right? And he was no longer a leader, but a single selfish actor working tirelessly on behalf of himself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, they had been exploring this cave. They had walked about an hour into the cave. And what's remarkable about the story is when they went in, the sky was sunny. Like they had no thought that a storm might be brewing or they had to worry about that.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It was the beginning of monsoon season, or some might say monsoon season came early and a sudden and torrential downpour came down that was so extreme that it just flooded the cave. And so when they turned back, they had probably been walking a little distance back when all of a sudden they got to a certain juncture where they were supposed to essentially go right.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And Wright was now filled with water, just completely filled with water. And so what Coach Eck did right then is he said, OK, we're going to try to find a way out. And so he decided to dive in. He tied a rope around his waist and he told the members of the soccer team, you know, when I pull on the rope, pull me back out.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But after about two minutes, he hadn't pulled on the rope and they were panicking. So they pulled him back out. And it's a good thing they did because he'd gotten a little stuck, a little disoriented. He had not found a way out. He was starting to struggle, and they essentially saved his life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
At this point, the water had filled up kind of up to this juncture, so they kind of went in deeper. They knew they weren't going to be getting out any time in the next few minutes, and they decided to, we're going to be spending the night here. They lie down. They got together for warmth. And they slept through the night and they woke up.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And the first thing they noticed is that the water was creeping on them. They thought they'd gone deep enough, but they hadn't. There's even more water coming into the cave.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
They did. At various points, they kept retreating deeper and deeper into the cave. And then at some point, they heard a sound. And they actually thought it was a helicopter. And they thought they were about to be saved. And they turned around, and that sound wasn't a helicopter, but it was almost like a tidal wave coming towards them. The water was now surging. It wasn't just creeping on them.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It was about to surround them and consume them. And they went as deep into the cave as they could, essentially in some ways to the highest point they could within the cave, almost on a ledge, if you will. And now they were surrounded by water on all sides. And this was about day five. And now they were stuck with essentially nowhere to go.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's a couple of things that I think are really important to know about what Coach Eck did in this situation. And the first and most important thing he did is that he convinced them that he had a plan to get them out. And the plan was, we're going to dig our way out. We're going to go up through the roof and we're going to keep digging.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And eventually we're going to dig all the way to safety. And that's what they did from morning to night. They dug in shifts. Coach Eck dug harder and than anyone else to the point his hands were bleeding. And they would ask him questions like, you know, how much longer? And he would say, just a little longer. And they all believed that they were working together to find this way out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Leaders are made. Because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring, we can study those, learn those, practice those, and develop those skills. It also means... that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the infuriating end of the continuum tomorrow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He said he wanted to salute mariners on shore. Other people said he was trying to impress his mistress, a Moldovan dancer who was on board. But this was a routine cruise ship that now became a crisis. When they went too close to shore, there was a massive hole, just like Tammy Jerry Schultz, a massive hole was put into his vessel. But he wasn't visionary. He was actually small-minded.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He spent the first hour trying to figure out how to protect his own reputation. He was only focused very small on this. It took him over an hour to contact the Coast Guard and then took him 20 minutes to come clean. He was trying to tell them that the blackout caused the accident rather than the accident causing the blackout.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And then when it was time to start getting the passengers to start doing this, he wasted 90 minutes, which led dozens and dozens of people to pass away. I think more than 100 people passed away on this trip, and it would have been very few if he had just acted immediately. But when the Coast Guard started communicating with him again, he wasn't on the ship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He was actually in one of the lifeboats and that just incensed, infuriated the Coast Guard. They demanded he go back on. He claims he fell into the lifeboat by accident. But you might not actually have recognized him in the lifeboat because somehow
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
despite all the chaos, despite him being captain of the ship, he somehow found time to remove his captain's uniform and put on civilian clothing before he fell into the boat. And so you can start to see just the dramatic difference between these two people. Schettino was... Sorry, Schultz was visionary, right? She could see the big picture. She could understand what she needed to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He was small-minded, right? She was calm and courageous protector. He was cowardly, right? And then she was generous and empathic, and he was purely selfish. And at the very end, the person from the Coast Guard basically tells him, I am going to make you pay for this, Shatino. And he did, Schatino paid. He spent time multiple years, I think he was sentenced to over 10 years in prison.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so you can really see, but that's the infuriation that this person was experienced from that. So we really see these three universal factors, right? How we see and talk about the world, how we are in the world and how we interact in the world between you want to be a Schultz and not a Schatino.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Thank you so much. Yeah. And there's another also amazing example as I look out on the Hudson River to my right at my office here in New York is Captain Sully, who landed, who lost both engines coming out of LaGuardia with bird strikes and basically glided his plane to land in the Hudson with no injuries, which is another remarkable story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Absolutely. One of the things that I've wondered about and thought about for almost two decades now is why are these the three universal factors of inspiring leaders or inspiring people more broadly? right? Why is being visionary, being exemplar and being a mentor, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I use these sort of as descriptions to describe the ways that we can inspire others, but also infuriate others is because each one of those satisfies a fundamental human need. And one of the fundamental human needs we have is a sense of meaning and understanding. That's where visionary comes from. Another is a sense of protection and energy. And that's where being an exemplar comes from.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And one of them is to be a sense of belonging and a sense of status or being respected. And that's where being a mentor comes from. And so what you just described is really that third factor, being a mentor and what it means to be seen and valued and recognized.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And the way that I often describe what are the characteristics of being someone who's an inspiring mentor, and I use it not in a formal sense, but just in the sense of how we interact with other people, right, and can fill them with that sense of inspiration or infuriation between those interactions is that inspiring leaders empower people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And empowering is really about trusting other people, right? If I'm going to give you responsibility, I trust that you can live up to the moment, right? Part of it is elevating other people and really recognizing what they do well and really celebrating those. And then also empathizing with people, like really understanding the context and their situations that they're in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Now, that doesn't mean right because we empathize people that we have low standards. Right. We have high standards. And that's what I mentioned earlier. Right. About my dad. being able to encourage people and elevate them, but also challenge them to be the best person they can be. And it's really this fundamental human need. You mentioned Dacher Keltner earlier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
One of his PhD students is a professor at Berkeley now in the business school. Cameron Anderson wrote a seminal paper basically demonstrating that we have a fundamental need to be respected by other people. to be elevated by other people, to be seen as having characteristics or traits or tendencies or talents that we can recognize in other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I have a paper under review right now where we're looking at the fact that so many people in the workforce are really freaked out about AI. Right. It's very disempowering. They're worried about losing their jobs or worried about losing status. And so we did a study where we use the classic manipulation and I use the same manipulation in some of my studies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It's one of the best ways that we can get into a visionary state of mind. We ask people think about a time when they think about what are their most important values in their life and how they've demonstrated those values and why they're important. And this has shown to make so many things better in their lives. It can motivate people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I showed that when people reflect on their values, if they're unemployed, they're twice as likely to find a job in the next two months than if they hadn't reflected on their values. But in this case, in the workplace, around AI, that values reflection task had no effect. It didn't impact. It didn't make people trust AI, more likely to experiment with AI.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
They were still ostriches putting their head in the sand and wanting to avoid it because they were scared. But then we did something different and we asked, what is it? What are they worried about? Why is this value affirmation, this value reflection task not working? They're really worried about losing standing in their organizations, of not being valued, of not being respected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So we went back to the drawing board and we did a different manipulation. And we asked people to think about the things about themselves that other people value in them. What is it about you that other people value, that they respect you for? And then that sense of getting their standing, their sense of being seen, recognized, valued, respected, affirmed and confirmed in their own mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Then they started to open up to the possibility of looking at AI, understanding what it is and utilizing it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Absolutely.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I think it's a big gap and part of the gap is a complicated one, right? Because at one level we want efficiency, right? And we want equity, right? And fairness. And so the question is when we start tailoring or personalizing motivation or rewards, we can get into those problematic areas. But let's just start off with like, how do we understand the motivations of others?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
The single biggest mistake we make is we think everyone's a mirror image of ourselves. One of the examples I give in the book, which I really love is that I've been dating my now wife for about just over two months. And we were going, I had to give a talk in DC and she was going to come down. It was a birthday.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I found out that one of my favorite comedians, Demetri Martin was going to be performing, but the show was sold out. So I spent like 36 hours doing everything I could. I have like friends of mine with Amex cards, trying to get tickets, like whatever I could do. And I finally was able to get two tickets and I thought I'd hit the boyfriend jackpot, but it turned out my wife hates standup comedy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It's just like, I love it. She hates it. She loves opera. I hate opera, right? So if you can imagine getting me opera for my birthday, right? And so one of the biggest problems is we really have to let go of our own perspective. And so one is they're not just like me, but they're also not just like each other. And anyone that has two kids immediately recognizes they come from us, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But how different each of those kids are. It's just one example. My older son, you can... He's generally outgoing, but you can like go to a party and he'll just walk right in and start interacting with people. And my son Aiden, it'll take him 45 minutes to go in that party.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So here's one of my great leadership inventions I did as a parent is I realized I just have to get to every party 30 minutes early. Because if I get to the party on time, it's going to take him 30 minutes to go in. But I've got the 30 minutes early. then he's finally going to be ready to go in right when the party starts. So that's just one small example.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Now, one of the questions is how do we create equity in the fact that different people value things differently, right? Just as one good example is some people may want more money. Other people may want more flexibility in their job. And so one of the things that I think is really important is how do we create rewards for people that are
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
are equal value or cost to you, but can tap into their different needs and desires that they have. And actually, one of the first consulting projects I ever worked on in my life was back in the mid-2000s out there. I was at Northwestern University of Chicago. There's a little company that you might have heard out that's headquartered out in the suburbs there called McDonald's.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
You might have heard of them. And so anyway, I was working with them and another professor, Huggy Rao, because they were trying to figure out the fact that they had two different types of workers. They had like teenagers, college students.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And then they had people that were like mothers and fathers who were, this job was actually what they needed to feed their family and to give housing to their family. And so the question is, how do you set up a set of rewards that cost the company the same, but are equally valuable? And so one of the things that we talked about was, well, what do the younger people want?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Well, they might want money for education. So you could give them as a reward, right? For every six months, we'll pay X amount of dollars towards education. What are older people? Well, maybe they want health insurance, right? To help their family be healthy and safe. And so part of it is we want to think about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
things that we can offer and give people a choice and that is probably the single i think biggest thing that i've done in my own research i've shown in negotiations one of the best ways to get the best possible outcome for yourself while leaving the other side satisfied is giving people a choice between different options that are equal value to you
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And then that allows you to be ambitious or even what some people might call aggressive in your offers because the choice is signaling flexibility, is signaling your desire to reach a deal. That means the other side is going to trust you more. And so you're going to get this great outcome. They almost always don't get a worse outcome. You've expanded the pie.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Leaders are made because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring. We can study those, learn those, practice those and develop those skills. It also means that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the inferior end of the continuum tomorrow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Most of it's gone to you, but they walk away satisfied. So choice really matters in the psychology of people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's not just thinking about the choice. Like one of my favorite movies is a movie called Out of Sight by Steven Soderbergh. And it's got George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez and so many amazing actors, but there's One point where Vin Rains says to George Clooney, they put a gun on you, you're going to prison.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He's like, they put a gun on you, you still have a choice, right? And this idea that sometimes we don't see choices and options. And part of that sometimes is just the routines that we follow through. And so part of it is how can we see the bigger picture? This is where visionary comes in. I'll give you one example, which I really love from my kids. So I take my kids to school every morning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
My wife picks them up in the afternoon. This is a special time we have together. And my one son was in a kindergarten. He was in the second floor, and my first grader was on the third floor. So naturally, we'd walk up to the second floor, drop off the kindergartner, and then walk up to the third floor, drop off the first grader. But there is a big problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
The problem is my kindergartner, the second born, is more relaxed. He likes to take his time. He liked having a big goodbye ritual with me. And my older son, older son, first born, type A, he hates the possibility of being even late. Even if he still had 10 minutes to get to his classroom, he'd be like, Aiden, hurry up. He would get so incensed and I would get so frustrated.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I'd be like, Asher, just be patient. And then he would storm up to his classroom. So after about, I don't know, a few weeks of this, I was just thinking about how could I make this go more smoothly today? And then I realized we actually have a choice. And I said to the boys, I said, hey, I have an idea. Why don't we try something different today? I'll drop Asher off first.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So I'll walk up to the third floor, drop Asher off first, then walk and do Aiden on the second floor. And it solved everything. So Asher was now happy. He got to class without stress on time. He'd give me a hug goodbye. Now he just gives me a high five. And then we walked downstairs. Aiden got to take as much time as he wanted. Big hugs. And to me, I was in my own world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I didn't even recognize that, like, like the teacher was observing Asher's behavior in the dynamic. And so about day three of our new routine, she said to me, she's like, wow, it's really an amazing success dropping Asher off first. And I was like, oh my God, you noticed all that? But even she noticed what a difference it made. And that's, I think, a great example of every time we're in a
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
John C. Difficult situation, we can ask, we want to take a step back and ask yourself what's going on here. John C. Right, how can we meet the needs of both people without a huge dramatic shift sometimes you need a dramatic shift, but in this case, all we had to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
John C. was get the younger one to walk up an extra flight of stairs and then come back down, but like it just but it changed everything.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
That's a great question. I love the metaphor. It's such a great example. I think there are a couple of things that I think are really matter. One of the benefits of being visionary, of having a vision and sharing that vision, that's really important. It's not just to have it, but share it and repeat it so that people really understand it, is it gives context for people's work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And you talked about earlier about wanting to be seen, be valued. People want to know how their individual effort is contributing to the larger whole. So part of that really big vision really matters. If you go back, a great example of that is John F. Kennedy says, by the end of this decade, we will walk on the moon.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so then people always, even, and it took a lot of little steps for NASA to get to the point where they were capable of doing that. But it was always in the context of, we know why we're doing this because it's in the service of this larger one. And one thing that you're bringing up is the difference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Sometimes people contrast between the CEO, the chief executive officer, and the COO, the chief operating officer, right? Where that person is really tasked with the daily execution and operation of in kind of some ways, mini visions that build up to the larger vision that someone has.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so I think that, yeah, we need to find, to be visionary means you have to find ways to implement your vision, right? And help people take those individual steps towards achieving that goal. But I think the larger goal is still really critical for helping people make sense of those individual steps that they're taking part of.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah, I think that's right. I think people, Generally, not everyone wants to achieve their full potential, right? And they want to be challenged to do that. And there's something that they really value, but there's a, there's this balance between challenging people. right? And let's say crippling their self-esteem, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so how do you challenge people, but also encourage them at the same time? And there's actually, there's a famous study that I don't cite in this paper because I didn't make this connection until right now in my book, but Jeff Cohen did this research, a guy at Stanford with David Yeager also, and they just wanted to understand
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
What's a type of, and Jeff Cohen's in the School of Education, he's a social psychologist with the School of Education at Stanford. How can teachers give the best feedback to students? And especially ones that can transcend different genders, different races, et cetera. And so part of it is that it's this three-step process is the leader sets the standard that they expect of people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
They highlight the ways that people have met the standard, but also ways they haven't, but also they show encouragement and belief in the other person. I know you can reach that standard. Right. And they help them maybe with a little coaching.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So it's really this idea of setting high standards, documenting where people have and have not reached that standard, but also believing in that they can reach that standard and expressing that encouragement to them. And so I think that is really the key.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah, let me just say one thing about the leader. So this is a phrase that I coined, the leader amplification effect. It really captures the idea that when we're leaders, we're on stage and everyone's looking at us. And so that's the big thing is that psychology tells us something really important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Anything that we're paying attention to that we're looking at, whatever that stimulus is, it's going to have an amplified reaction on us and we're going to have a more intense reaction to it. And so that's really what the leader amplification effect is. And that can be good or bad, right? Like an offhand compliment versus an offhand criticism can have hugely monumental effects on people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Thank you so much. The honor is all mine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
That's also why Tammy Jo Schultz's phrase, we're not going down, we're going to Philadelphia was so powerful is because she was that leader. Everyone was paying close attention to everything that she said. I started my PhD at Princeton University in 1993.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And the first class I ever took was with Danny Kahneman, who is the only psychologist who would one day go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he just arrived with incredible fanfare from University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the top five paid employees of the entire university. Like, I think he might have even been second or third, like after the president and general counsel.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I think he was third, actually. Anyway, so there's 11 of us, so 10 other people. classmates that are first year doctoral students at Princeton in psychology. And in the first day of class, I raised my hand and I'm eager to prove that I belong, that I'm valued and respected, as we've talked about already. And I still remember the four things Danny did that day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He crossed his arms, he shrunk up his face, he shook his head and he said, that's not right at all. And then he smiled and he moved on and the rest of the class moved on, but I was frozen in place. Like I felt humiliated, right? His offhand comment, that's not right at all, it reverberated inside of me, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But then, and it took me weeks before I felt comfortable speaking in any class, let alone Danny's class. About five or six weeks later, I was walking in the hallway and Danny's walking this way and I'm walking this way. And Danny just over his shoulder says, hey, Adam, I love reading your reflection papers. Then he turns the corner. And you're a great writer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He said, I love reading your reflection papers. You're a great writer. And that offhand compliment filled me with so much joy, I literally skipped down the hallway. I didn't know what to do with my energy. And so what I like about this example is these are two casual, offhand, inconsequential comments by Danny Kahneman that he doesn't even remember to this day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But because of his position of authority, but also because of the respect, so much eyes were on him paying close attention to what he said, right? What he said got magnified, amplified, intensified, right? So that that's not right at all became like humiliating criticism, right? Crushing criticism. But that you're a great writer became glorious praise. And so I realized in that moment how
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
These offhand comments can have a huge impact, right? You mentioned the percent lows who's well-respected. One comment could like green light or red light a project, right? One of my favorite examples of this is a man named Barry Salzberg, who was CEO of Global Deloitte. And after he, you know, there's tens of thousands of employees.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And after a few months, he realized there was always bananas at important meetings. And he's like, huh, are bananas a symbol of Deloitte that I didn't discover my 30 years here? Does someone really important love bananas? So he asked his assistant, why do we have bananas at every meeting? And she said, because you love bananas. He's like, wait, what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So apparently the first meeting he ever attended, the assistant was like paying close attention to whatever he did. And she saw him pick up a banana with a little bit of enthusiasm and eat it. And so she coded that as Barry Salzberg loves bananas. We have to have bananas at every meeting. And that's such a great example how he didn't even say anything. It was so incidental.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It was so offhand, but it had this massive impact.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
That's a great question. I think that there are so many different moments that we can think of in our lives that really matter. To me, probably one of the biggest moments of my life was not just a single moment in time, but a little bit longer is in
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah. And I think it also ties into so much of what we've talked about because I said there's these three universal factors, right? Being visionary, being exemplary, and being a mentor. You've just highlighted how being visionary and being a mentor go together. What's the vision for campus visits? The vision for campus visits is, I think, twofold.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
One is to present your university in an optimal way, right, positive way. But two is to make the people that are visiting feel excited and valued and respected. And so Harvard lost the vision, right? The vision isn't to be realistic, right? The vision is to create a sense of excitement and wonder in these people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Sure, they're probably not going to get in there, but that the dreaming of getting in there is also something that's really positive and powerful. And so why kill someone's dream? Right. Why not that dream? They might not get into Harvard, but maybe they'll get into Princeton or Cornell or Penn or Duke or UNC or Texas or UCLA, other great schools.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so there's like the idea of like killing someone's dream. is just so unnecessary. It's cruel. It's selfish. It's patronizing. It's small-minded, right? And so to me, what I see in that and what happened to you and your daughter was they didn't have a vision that was generous towards the people that they were interacting with. And I'm sure it would have a huge impact.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
When I was a junior, after my junior in high school, before my senior high school, I went and lived with a family in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for three months. And that was just such a transformative experience to be on the other side of the world, to be in a very different culture. The family I lived in was solidly middle class, but I had to use the bathroom and a hole in the ground.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And you can just ask yourself, what was the point of the Harvard person saying that? What purpose did it really serve? And so I think that's one thing that we learn as leaders is after, we could be honest about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But one of the things you talked about, visions, you talked about goals, you talked about, you could, someone at NASA could have said, look, the odds of us ever walking on the moon are so low and it's certainly not going to happen for 20 years, right? But like, what's the purpose of doing that? Let's work towards a goal. And maybe instead of 20 years, it becomes 12 years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It's not 10, but that's okay. We're still better off than we were by not having that ambitious goal. And there's a famous phrase, there's no point to rain on someone's parade, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah. And I think there's different ways that we can try to create rewarded motivational systems that matter for people. I personally, based on everything I know, am very much against Rankin-Yank systems. And the Rankin-Yank system would be something where like every year, 10% of people have to be fired and only 10% of people get promoted or something like that. And those systems
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
are horrible for collaboration, for teamwork. And Microsoft was famous at one point for doing that within teams. So you have a seven person team. One of you is gonna be out of here. How are you gonna collaborate with each other? But that's different from still having very high standards.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So Netflix is famous for their keeper test, where like, when you decide whether to retain someone at the end of the year is, what do I fight to keep this person? And what's better about, like you can say it's cutthroat, but what's better about that system is you're just competing against yourself, right? You're not competing against anyone else. That means you don't have to undermine anyone else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
We can actually help each other all be kept, right? And so I think that's part of it is how do you create high standards that don't lead to cutthroat competitiveness and all the downsides that occur with that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I had to share a bed with my Indonesian brother because I didn't have more space, but it was just A time in my life that really changed who I was and helped me really identify. I guess that changed who I was, helped me identify who I was.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So I've been studying this concept called perspective taking for almost 30 years now. Actually, 1995, I started my dissertation and that was what I ended up studying. And the title of my dissertation was Perspective Taking. de-biasing social thought.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And one of the things that I've discovered over the years is that perspective-taking really is this superpower, and it functions in so many different ways. One of the ways it functions is it helps us navigate a diverse world by understanding the different perspectives. So I've shown in my research, my award-winning dissertation, that perspective-taking decreases the tendency to stereotype others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I've also shown in negotiations that when we're really good at understanding the other side, we can propose creative solutions that not only get us what we want, but also solve whatever issue our partner or opponent, the other side, is experiencing. It's also really helpful for innovation to take perspectives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And sometimes we're taking the perspectives of individuals, and other times we're taking the perspectives of what we might call a class of people. So one of the things I've studied in my research, and you mentioned in my TED Talk earlier about how to speak up for yourself, is I've studied power dynamics.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so one of the things that we know is there's a term I mentioned, the leader amplification effect. I have another term that I coined called the leader silencing effect. And the leader silencing effect is that Because of our power and our authority and our position, we tend to silence the perspectives of other people. But those perspectives can be incredibly valuable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
They can carry the critical insight, even if someone's like lower down in the social hierarchy. And so one of the things we have to do to get to wise decisions or innovative solutions as a leader of a group is we got to to lower the risk of speaking up. We got to reduce the leader silencing effect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so one of the ways that we can do that is we can take the perspective of what prevents low power people from speaking up. And if we can identify those things that prevent them from speaking up, we can counteract them. So one of the things that you mentioned is, and I mentioned this word elevating other people before, elevating. If you know someone in the room who has
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
unique expertise or experience, you want to highlight it, say, hey, I know Jane over here has worked for 20 years in this industry, and I'd love to get her perspective on what might be a solution as we try to enter that market, right? And so by highlighting that, it's elevating that person saying, their opinion really matters. It's lowering their risk of speaking up, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Versus Danny Kahneman telling me my point wasn't right at all, right? That was so shattering to me of my confidence. It increased the risk of my speaking up for a very long time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And so that's one of the things we wanna do is we wanna take the perspective of our opponent negotiation, of our interaction, the person we're trying to motivate, like what's gonna motivate this person, but also because I'm a leader, What is the perspective of someone with less power than me?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And how can I mitigate some of those constraining forces that prevent them from sharing their perspectives and therefore not allowing for wise decisions or innovative solutions?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It's a great point. I still remember when I was reading The Gatsby, my dad, without skipping a beat, could quote that entire last page. And that's, again, an example of being in awe of his competence, right? But he also, that was part of his vision, right? And I write in the book that my parents had infuriating flaws, but really inspired me about both my mom and dad
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
is they wanted to be a better person today than they were yesterday, and they wanted to be more inspiring tomorrow than they were today. And so just like that green light, they strove towards that. So I would say the single biggest thing, maybe the core of this book, is that it answers centuries old question, right? Are leaders born or are they made?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I think that I've shown definitively that leaders are made because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring. We can study those, learn those, practice those, and develop those skills. It also means that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the inferior end of the continuum tomorrow. But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better, right? You can strive towards that green light of inspiration. And so part of it is that we have to stay the course, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Even when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the winds of chaos are all around us, we have to keep going forward. And here's a final thing that I think is really important from my research is that don't be too hard on yourself. One of the things that I've shown in my research is shame is a particularly destructive emotion.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It makes us into defensive monsters or hiding ostriches, putting our head in the sand. And so none of us are perfect. we're all going to make mistakes, right? I'm going to be an infuriating person tomorrow, even with the best efforts. And so the question is, how do we recover from that? And how do we become more inspiring tomorrow? If we dwell on those moments and we beat ourselves up, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
We're going to be incapable of seeing the big picture, right? Of being that calm, courageous protector and really empathizing with others. So we've got to focus outward. We've got to strive towards that. And one thing I think that all of us can do
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
is once a month, reflect on times when you're infuriating, but also when you're inspiring, and also to reflect on the people in your life and when they inspired you and how you might emulate those behaviors. And then just once a month, take whatever you've reflected on, those emulations and reflections, and just make one commitment for the next month. Here's one thing I'm going to do better.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Now I'm going to do is I'm visionary, but my message is too complex. I'm going to simplify it. I'm going to do this next month. I'm going to try to be calmer even when I'm experiencing time pressure. Now I'm going to do this month. Every couple of days, I'm going to elevate someone and point out what a great job they're doing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
If we can do those reflections and emulations into intentions, right, we're going to be more inspiring, more of the time. We're going to spread the seeds of inspiration and we're going to make the world a better place to be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So there are sort of two events that happened back in 2006 within a couple of months of each other. The first was very sadly, I was on a plane at the time, but my dad was walking to a basketball game in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and got hit by a car and killed. And I found out when I'd landed to go to a conference in Los Angeles about midnight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
AdamGalinsky.com. Awesome.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Thank you so much. It was such an honor to be here and thanks for all of your generosity today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And the one saving grace from that moment, I was just, you can imagine how wrecked I was emotionally and torn apart is my dad's only sibling lived in Los Angeles. And so I was able to go to her house, my aunt's house. And I still remember very clearly when we, she opened the door, hugged in the sense of sorrow, but also this mutual comfort that we're giving each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I plaintively said to her, I can't believe I've lost my dad. And she said, we've all lost a dad. I was his big sister, but he was my dad. And that was such just an incredibly transformative comment. And I just kept coming back to it. I kept asking myself, why did that ring so true? Why did that sense that he was the dad to many matter so much?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I realized that his memorial service, which was about a month later at the university, he was a professor, like about 500 people showed up. And how many people told me stories about the impact of my dad had. And then about two months later, I was teaching the FBI. And I was with 60 FBI agents. And one of them started talking about a leader that inspired them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I still remember that moment, too, because he stood up in his chair. He got big in his posture. His eyes lit up. He used his hands. He leaned in. And it was just like, and there's almost like this sense of this like awe and admiration emanating from him. And so at that moment, I turned to the rest of the FBI agents and I was like, Well, can any of you tell me about a leader that inspired you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And they all could. And so I started that like literally changed everything I do in teaching. That was the first thing I started to do. Whenever I taught leadership, I started asking people, tell me about a leader that inspired you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Now, about a year later, I was again teaching the FBI, but this time, one of the agents didn't want to talk about a leader that inspired him, but wanted to talk about a leader that infuriated him, that made his blood boil, the seething cauldron of rage and resentment. And so over time. I started asking people those two questions. Tell me about a leader that inspired you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Tell me what was that feeling, that sense of warmth and energy and light and that sense of awe and admiration, that wellspring of hope and possibility. And then I also asked people to tell me about a leader that infuriated them, right? That made their blood boil. And part of the reason why I did that is because
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
In psychology, we know that when you make comparative analysis, you learn much more deeply and you discover things more unique and real.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
But one of the things I realized after starting asking hundreds of people and then thousands of people and probably tens of thousands of people at this point on that same question is I started to realize that the inspiring leader and the fearing leader were actually mirror images of each other, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Someone talk about a leader that empowered them, but someone else would talk about a leader that micromanaged them and infuriated them. Or they talk about a leader that could see the big picture versus the leader that was small minded or the leader that was courageous versus the leader that was cowardly. And so I started to realize that they existed on this sort of enduring continuum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And then the second thing I realized was that all of these examples from every country in the world, every continent, regardless where I was, they tended to make up these three categories. what I call universal factors, right? And they really captured what it means to be in the spotlight, to be a leader, to be impacting other people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I can tell you more about those or we could talk about, but basically, you know, what the transformed moment was this moment where my dad passed away, but my aunt said he was my dad, even though I was his big sister. And then this two FBI experiences. And here's what's the crazy part is I went back and I looked at the memorial speech I wrote for my dad. right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
I looked at it like two or three years later. And I realized that the entire speech was actually structured around these three universal factors that I hadn't even discovered yet. So I talked about how the way my dad saw the world, like that he was a visionary, right? I talked about how my dad was in the world, right? How he was passionate, but also courageously protected people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And I talked about how he interacted with people in the world, about how he empathize people and encourage them, but also had high expectations and really challenged them to be the best person they could be. And so it's those sort of moments together in my dad's passing, these FBI moments that really led me down this path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny to me that Schultz and Schettino both start with the same sort of pronunciation, right? Schultz, Schettino. But Tammy Jo Schultz was flying. She was the captain of Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 going from LaGuardia to Dallas when suddenly, as she described it, she thought she'd had a midair collision.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
It literally felt like a jet, a Mack truck had crashed into her because there was this incredible... Incredibly loud jolt of the plane. And then this like loss of pressure, loss of oxygen, rushing sound. And she eventually realized what had happened, which was the left engine had exploded and tore a hole in the side of the plane.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And this was not something that she caused or not something that she had planned for, right? But she did so many different things in that moment in time that were really remarkable. The first thing she did was she stayed calm. She tried to figure out exactly what was going on. Her first officer, Darren Elliser was the one flying the plane.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So she told him, continue to fly the plane that he was in charge of moving the aircraft. Eventually they realized that she described it, the plane wanted to descend. So we let the plane do what it wanted to do. So she, she paid attention to what was happening in the moment and they started descending.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Now here's the second thing that she did that is really important and really powerful is she uttered 10 words to the passengers. Those 10 words were, we are not going down. We are going to Philly. Now, that might seem like a simple comment, but she recognized, right, as they're descending with a hole in the plane that the passengers might be freaking out. And they were.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
They were sending messages, emails, telling their loved ones, I may never see you again. I love you so much. And the passengers afterwards talked about how transformative those 10 words were.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And it's really powerful because I describe in the book a number of other instances where there wasn't quite as much of a tragic situation, but planes precipitously dropped thousands of feet and flight attendants were injured and babies flew up in the air and were caught miraculously in more than one flight and the pilots never said a word.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
So Tammy Jo Schultz knew that she needed to reassure her passengers. And then she landed the plane in Philadelphia. And then the other remarkable thing is is that she kept thinking about what was best for her passengers, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Not just telling them we're going to Philadelphia, but she parked the plane so that the fire trucks were on the side where the engine exploded in a place there was fire that needed to put out. put the wing flaps down a little bit. So then in case anyone panicked and went on the wing, they would have a little slide.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
And then she went row by row and looked every passenger in the eye and said, how are you doing? She checked in on them. And I think that was such a powerful thing that she did that was so important. And she said afterwards, I find it remarkable that more people have talked about what I did after the plane landed, which is talking to the passengers, each one, than the passengers
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
Remarkable feat that it took to actually land this crippled plane. And so you can just see that this was a crisis, but she turned it into something that was more routine. She was calm. Even the EMT actually made a joke to her when he was checking out. He said, how did you get through security? She's like, wait, what are you saying?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
He said, how did your nerves of steel not set off all of the security alarms? And she was calm. And because she was calm and she was so good at her job, she could see the bigger picture. So she could see, let's go to Philadelphia. That was actually recommended by her. Colleague Darren Elliser, her co-pilot, she knew that she needed to speak to them. She knew exactly what she needed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Adam Galinsky on How Great Leaders Inspire Their Teams | EP 560
She let the plane descend. She knew exactly what she needed to do to land this plane. And then she made sure everyone was okay. Now, Francesco Schettino, he was also captain of a vessel. This was a cruise ship. And this was a situation where they were embarking on a seven-day trip through the Mediterranean, and he got too close to shore. Now, there's a lot of debate about why he did.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
There's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. So what are these three universal factors?
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Yeah, sure. I'll tell you a story about a remarkable pilot that I think really captures that. Tammy Jo Schultz was flying Southwest Airlines 1380 from LaGuardia to Dallas when the left engine exploded and literally tore a hole in the side of her plane. One passenger was sucked into that hole and didn't survive. It was fatal.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
But she miraculously and remarkably landed the plane with no further injuries. And we can see these three elements come into bear. The first thing that she recognized was, as she described it, she said the plane wanted to descend, so we let it do what it wanted to do and we descend it. Now, that's fine. That's great.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
She's a great pilot, but she recognized that when there's a hole in a plane and you're descending, the passengers probably think that plane is going down. She got on the intercom and she gave them what I call an optimistic why, this vision for what was happening. She said 10 simple words. The passengers commented afterwards that it literally transformed the entire cabin from
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
just abject fear to hope and possibility. She said, we are not going down. We are going to Philly, right? And so she gave them a why and a where and where they were headed. Now, if you listen to her on the intercom, she is the most calm. They're like, is your plane on fire? She's like, no, but there is a hole in it. It's pretty damaged, just very matter of fact.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
And when she landed, she was immediately evaluated by EMTs. And one of them said to her, how did you get through security?" She looked at him puzzled like, what are you talking about? He said, how did your nerves of steel not set off the security alarms? You're completely calm. Your heart rate is normal. Your physiology is normal. She was that exemplar of desired behavior.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
She was a calm, the eye of the hurricane, but courageous protector of the people on that passenger. Then, before she left the plane, She walked row by row and looked every passenger in the eye and made sure they were okay. Afterwards, she commented, she's like, I'm still surprised that more reporters have commented on what I did after the plane landed
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
going row by row than what it took to fly this crippled plane. And that shows that she was this inspiring mentor, right? She was empathizing and taking care of the people and encouraging them and making sure that they were okay. And so these are these three elements about how to do that.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I think that's also true. I think that one of the things that I've discovered about inspiring leaders, people who are more inspiring more of the time, not always inspiring, they're occasionally infuriating, is that they've really set up practices or habits for how to be a better person, essentially. They've tried to embed them into their daily lives. Let me give you just one example of this.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
which is one of the things that we can do to really lift people into the clouds is that especially when we're in positions of leadership because i actually coined a phrase that called the leader amplification effect that everything we do as a leader good and bad, small and big, gets amplified, and then its impact is intensified on us.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
A frown from a leader is like a knife in your heart, but a compliment can lift you into the clouds. There was someone that I was talking to, president of a bank, 1,400 employees. He said, here's what I do every single morning. Over my cup of coffee, I send a birthday greeting to every one of my employees. It's pretty simple. He showed me an example.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It's like, hey, Mike, I hope you have a great birthday. How was bowling and jogging this weekend? He can pump five of these out a day in less than 10 to 15 minutes, but then he showed me the responses he gets back. It's like, oh my God, I had such a great weekend. This is what we did in bowling. It's like a novel that comes back.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
He said that he realized that he says, sending those birthday messages They put a skip in their step, but they also put a skip in my step. They come back to me and they make me feel good by their responses. I think that is something that goes back to the Bible. Reap what you sow. If we send out infuriating signals into the world, we're going to get infuriating signals back.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
When we plant the seeds of inspiration, we spread those seeds, but we also get the blooming flowers of inspiration coming back to us. That's a great example. He had a daily habit of sending these messages right forward. Right. You could do that yourself.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Every morning you could wake up, have a cup of coffee and just say something positive, constructive, complimentary, expressing gratitude to someone in your orbit. And you're going to put a skip in their step and they're going to put a skip in your step when they reply.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I think there's two different aspects of it I think are really important there. The first is, I don't know if they would say I'm inspiring because many of the people who are truly inspiring also tend to be humble people and so wouldn't identify themselves as inspiring, but they certainly recognize that they work on one of these three universal features.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
So, for example, one person might talk about how, yeah, I work really hard on making sure I see the big picture. I communicate it. I make sure that we all are going in an optimistic direction. I find ways to simplify it so that people can understand that. Or someone else is like, yeah, I really practice at being calm in a crisis, right? I know how important that is.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I know because of leader amplification effect that my anxiety will become their anxiety. But if I'm calm, they're going to be calm. Or they say, I work really hard at trying to meet the needs of other people, being that good mentor. They might not use those words, but they recognize the power. Here's the one element that I think characterizes every person that we might describe as inspiring.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It goes back to one of the things that we've already talked about is, again, the power of reflection. The people that are truly inspiring reflect on their experience. They reflect on the things they did good that day. and they work on how they might continue them. They also reflect on the times when they didn't see the big picture, or they lost their temper, or they were anxious in a crisis.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
They think about how they could be better the next time. I think that is really so profoundly fundamental. People say only the reflected life is worth living, but the reflective life is what allows us to be the best possible version of ourselves.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
There are not. I think that, again, gets back to this idea that leaders aren't born, that they're made. I will say that there's one thing that I think does really help people be more inspiring and why it's so important to be inspiring yourself is that it's a heck of a lot easier to be inspiring if you had inspiring people as your mentors, as your parents, as your leaders.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
One of the things that we know is that we tend to perpetuate the leadership that we receive ourselves. I discovered this self as a father. My dad had this volcanic rage that would come out for spilling milk, just ridiculous. tortured and terrorized me. I even had nightmares with my dad chasing me in my dreams. My dad was a wonderful person.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
He's probably the most inspiring person in my life, but he had this one infuriating flaw. Early on, as a parent, two little boys, they would spill milk and I I would explode in rage. I felt like I'd become my dad. I saw the effect on them, the immediate impact, the sense of that fugue state of panic that they experienced when that rage came out. I had to train myself to not be my dad.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
and to be a different type of father, to have all of his inspiring traits, but not take on that one frustrating flaw. That, again, gets back to the power of reflection. I could reflect on my experience. I could reflect from where it came from, but I could also then plan and make commitments and put in practices in place to prevent them from happening in the future.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Thanks so much, Mike. I really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for asking such amazing questions.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be here.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It's a great question. About 20 years ago, I had an experience where I was teaching the FBI and one of the agents started talking about a leader of his that inspired him. It was such a remarkable moment for me because I saw everything about his body change. His eyes light up. He smiled. He looked wistfully in awe. You could tell that this leader, for whatever they did, changed that person inside.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
They created that sense of wellspring of hope and possibility. At that moment, I decided I wanted to study what was it about that person or about people in general that inspire others. I started a two-decade-long journey in which I've asked thousands and probably tens of thousands of people a very simple question, which is, tell me about…
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
What I've discovered with these thousands and thousands of examples is it turns out that there are three universal characteristics or factors that really distinguish between these people that change us inside positively and another type of leader, I call them the infuriating leader, that create these sort of seething cauldrons of rage and resentment inside of us.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It actually turns out it's A, systematic, and B, universal. There's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. What are these three universal factors? Well, the first one is how we kind of look at the world, how we conceive and perceive the world.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
And I call that being visionary. The second factor is how we kind of stand in the world, our presence, how we are in the world. And I call that being an exemplar of desired behavior. And the third factor is how we interact with others in the world. And I call that sort of being a great mentor. And so these are the three universal factors, being visionary, being an exemplar and being a mentor.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. You may be inspiring today, but infuriating tomorrow, right? What you do today is not going to protect you from falling to the other end of the continuum. And so we're never going to be inspiring all the time. We're never going to reach this apotheosis of inspiring perfection. But we can...
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
strive to be more inspiring tomorrow than we were today, right? And that is, I think, the fundamental, most important insight of my research.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Well, so I think one of the other key things that my research has shown is that one of the foundational elements for being more inspiring today than you were yesterday is the power of reflection, reflecting on our experiences, reflecting on important aspects of ourselves. And so I actually can go through and I can give you what is the key reflection that allows us to be more visionary or more
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
exemplary or a better mentor because I think these provide profound insights for how we can become more inspiring. Let me tell you about a study that we did, which I think is going to have a big impact on listeners. If any of you out there have ever lost a job, you know how demoralizing it is, how humiliating it is. I lost my first post-college job three months after being hired.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I was fired and I was just so demoralized. We did this study with the Swiss government. We went into an employment agency where everyone has to register in order to get unemployment benefits in Switzerland. We gave half of these people coming into the employment agency a little 15-minute reflection task. We said, I want you to think about your values. What are your top five values?
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Now, put them in a hierarchy. What's your most important value? What's the one that animates the others? Just put them in a little hierarchy. Now, I want you to think about why are those values important to you. Then, finally, think about times when you've demonstrated those values recently in your own behavior.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Two months later, we found that people who were given this values recall intervention, this reflection task, were twice as likely to have a job than people in our control condition. In fact, the effect was so strong, we stopped the study and gave everybody the values reflection intervention. Now, what's going on there?
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
There's something, again, getting back to that need for meaning and understanding, there's something about our reflecting on our values that centers us. that gives us a little bit of optimism, a little bit of agency, and allows us to overcome all those psychological deprivations that occur when we lose a job.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Yeah, so for me, I've done this task myself. We actually give it to every single MBA student walking into Columbia Business School. And so you just start thinking about it. Now, one of the things we do is we give people a link to a list of values because it's hard to create them off the top of your head. It's a Google Sheet.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I started just thinking about values and I put some down and then I realized I found another one that was more meaningful toward me. I had a particular ranking and then I changed it. For me, my single top value is generosity.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It's not just generosity financially, it's generosity in spirit and in thought, being generous in trying to give people the best interpretation for their behavior, trying to contextualize why someone did something, giving people the benefit of the doubt. My second important thing is what I call positive energy, optimism, humor, good-naturedness. Another value of mine is creativity.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
How do we be creative and solve the problems that we have in unique and creative ways? Another one is what I call kaizen. Now, my wife spent time in Japan and they have a word for continued improvement. which is kind of the heart of inspire and how to inspire others. That, to me, is really important. How I want to always be striving to be better at everything I do.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Every time I do a podcast, I want to do it better the next time, for example. Then you can start to think about why do those values matters so much to me. Well, I want to always be improving. I love creative solutions. I love humor. Every birthday, I go see stand-up comedy. It's really important to me. But generosity is the one that drives them all because that's what I want to be in the world.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
I want to be a generous person, always trying to give people what they need, giving them the benefit of the doubt. Then I can think about times recently where I could have blown up at someone, but I thought about the fact that they were going through a really rough time.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
and i i gave them you know um a little serenity for that um or a time where i screwed something up but the next time i did it better and i had that continued improvement
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
That's it. You know, 15 minutes. I mean, this thing is, like, we don't really know what the secret sauce is yet because we collect lots of measures to say, what is it that's transforming people to getting jobs? Jeff Cohen of Stanford University, he did a study with at-risk middle school students. He gave them this values reflection eight times over two years to some group of students.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
Five years later, they were more likely to graduate high school and go to college. There's something powerful. One of the most profound truths about humans is that we have a clarion call and need for a sense of meaning and higher purpose. Our values, in a sense, give us that sense of meaning and higher purpose.
Something You Should Know
The Essential Qualities of Inspiring People & The Rules of How Life Works
It's why being visionary is one of the three fundamental dimensions of being an aspiring person.