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.
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.