Dr. Tasha Eurich
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Have I taken you off track? Have I ruined the plan?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
So Emily, just to briefly summarize, is a successful professional in healthcare. She has three children who are younger and therefore require a lot more time and energy. She has a husband who is battling health challenges. Of course, at her job, they're asking her to do more with less as we all are continuously. I wonder like how much less can we actually do more with at any given point?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And she thinks she's handling the stress well. Something pops up, which is that her son starts having behavioral problems. He's having tantrums at home, tantrums at school. His teachers are concerned about him. And To her great regret, she and her husband started talking about the situation. And she said, this doesn't seem like it's a huge pressing challenge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Let's see what the school can do for him. Let's see what we can do for him. And let's reassess, right? Let's reassess in a month or six weeks. They learned shortly after that her son was being bullied by a girl in his grade named Greta. And Emily thought that she was fine through all of this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
She did notice, well, so she amped up her self-care, just like I said, she even gave up all added sugar, including her beloved gummy bears. She was crying in her car on her way to work a little bit more than she would admit. She was exercising less, she was drinking more, but she was fine, right? It's that like, how are you doing? I'm fine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
So she was doing everything right in the resilience playbook. Until one day, she broke under the weight of a feather. She was taking her son Clark, the one who was being bullied, to school, to kindergarten drop-off. And he seemed very anxious, and she looked down at him, and he said, Mama, that's her. That's Greta. That's the girl who's bullying me. And she basically blacked out at that point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
She marched up to this little girl and her mom, started yelling at the little girl, yelling at the mom. And it ended with a, what is now comical, but was then illustrative of just how far, how little her coping resources were giving her. They got into a tug of war over a set of school supplies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And the reason I think that story is something that we can all relate to is life today basically looks like this, at least for stressed out strivers, who's the audience for this book. A higher than before level of stress, a higher baseline of stress than five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, punctuated by unexpected crises that we don't see coming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And so what happens, and we saw this with Emily, is we think we're fine. When whether we know it or not, we might be one crisis away from breaking, and that crisis doesn't have to be something dramatic. It can be. I'll give you just a very quick example. I was scanning the last round of revisions in my printer for my publisher like a couple of months ago, and the scanner stopped working.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And I literally did one of those dramatic throw the papers all over the room and slowly slide down the wall crying and wondering why my life was so terrible. That's what it looks like. Been there, done that. We've all had that dramatic sliding down the wall crying movie moment, right? And so I think there's just something in that for all of us. And we're experiencing that in all parts of our life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And you are not alone. I heard an almost identical story from a CEO that I was coaching maybe six months ago. He kept telling me he was fine and fine through this major organizational transformation that he was leading.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And he called me one day and he said, so today for no real reason, when something really small happened that didn't go the way I wanted it to in our team meeting, I started yelling at everyone. So. I guess I'm not fine, right? And that's the thing is like, we're fine until the moment that we're not fine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Sure. I think maybe a good way to think about this are do's and don'ts. One of the biggest mistakes that people make that's a don't is using past strategies to cope with completely new problems. And you brought up the budworm outbreak of the 1970s in Canada and Maine as an example. It's a hard story to break into sound bites, but it's fascinating.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And essentially what happened was this was the biggest spruce budworm outbreak that had ever been seen. What happened before, it was the seventh outbreak that they tracked. And it was every number of years, the budworms would come. There would be no human intervention because back then they didn't have chemicals like DDT. And it would go on for sometimes up to 10 years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And the forest would reclaim its resilience at some point. And in epidemic seven, which again was in the seventies, they had by this time discovered in other types of outbreaks, this chemical called DDT. And I could not, if my life depended on it, pronounce the full name, although I did for my audio book. So people can listen to that, but it's the acronym is DDT.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And because they had used this chemical for everything else, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
because they had this hammer and everything was a nail they decided what better way to fight the spruce budworm outbreak than to spray millions of acres of trees with ddt unfortunately that made the epidemic worse and there's a lot of technical stuff i won't go into about why that was but i think it's such a good metaphor of when we're facing an entirely new problem
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Going back to our old coping strategies that worked maybe when our life was a little bit normal, it's a big don't. And I think along that same line, another don't is to make resilience your only coping strategy. We know that resilience has limits. We know that some people have more resilience than others through no fault of their own.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
What I think the right way to use resilience as, the do's, are first of all, sometimes there are these sudden, huge, massive crises that we have to just get through, right? And sometimes just getting through is a miraculous achievement. But again, if we use that every single time something bad happens to us, we're going to run out of resilience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And so the last do I would share is to really think about your resilience as an exhaustible resource an example this is one of the things that helps me i think it's a resilience practice i love adult coloring books i'm an introvert and i have a whole adult coloring book about introverts but if that helps me in after i had a stressful day at work
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And then the next day I have a family crisis and I use the adult coloring book and you know where I'm going with this, right? If you continue to use this blindly without thinking about your strategy, you're assuming that resilience is going to continue as long as you need it to continue to help you. And so I know there's a lot there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
This is a pretty rich topic, but I think the biggest take home is to not use old solutions to solve brand new and chronic problems.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I'm going to take maybe an unpopular opinion. I'm popular in the fact that I'm a people pleaser and I hate disagreeing, but I feel professionally obligated to. That analogy is great, but we have to follow it to its logical conclusion.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
In Shatterproof, I use this analogy and I use the example of imagine you're back in high school and you're sitting in a class and your teacher is droning on about something that you neither understand nor care about. And you fiddle in your bag and you find a rubber band and you start stretching it and letting it go back, stretching it and letting it go back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Kind of a makeshift fidget spinner, right? And over the semester, that rubber band becomes your constant companion. Every time you're stressed, you're pushing it open, you're putting it back. What happens to a rubber band over time if you keep doing that? It breaks, right? It will snap. And when it comes to this idea of hitting our resilience ceiling,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Most of us don't even know we have a resilient ceiling until we're bouncing off of it. In the same way that you're stretching your reliable rubber bands, right? It's always served you well, but by the way, your stress keeps coming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
So that's another sort of polite disagreement I'd have with that analogy, which is it assumes we live in a world where you can let the rubber band go back to normal for a long enough period of time. And so from my perspective, I actually think the analogy is really good to show the benefits of resilience. But what we miss is that it also shows us that resilience is an exhaustible resource.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And I will tell you this from personal experience and from so many people that I've interviewed and studied, is it runs out at the worst possible time and the time we least expect it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I feel so strongly about that because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
It's interesting. I don't know if I can pick one. I want to just slightly revise the third mind shift. It's actually going from bouncing back to growing forward. I might choose that one because I think it summarizes this process of becoming shatterproof almost better than anything else can. And you think about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
How do we deal with our daily stresses and challenges in the course of the lives that we lead? We wake up every day,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
we never get through our to-do list there are more people demanding things of us than we can possibly satisfy and we get by and that doesn't mean that we don't have wonderful moments and great connections and can have a life that we find generally fulfilling but i think that sort of again that elevated baseline of stress punctuated by unexpected crises leads so many of us to have this mentality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And I'll be honest, I'm in a time in my life right now with this book launch where I'm slipping back into bouncing back. I'm saying, I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survived today. I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving. But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I'm saying I just have to get through this day, right? It's okay if I just survive today. I'm not even going to set the bar at thriving. But don't we all deserve more than to get by every day and to survive and say, well, at least I made it through the day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I feel so strongly about that because I think with the amount of change and challenge that we're all facing, many of us have unintentionally lowered the bar. and just said, like, last night, I finished my newsletter at God knows what time in the morning, probably when people were waking up for work. And I said, good job, self, you made it through another day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And becoming shatterproof is a daily choice, right? It's not time consuming, it's not complicated. But I actually had a moment this morning where I actually had to sit down and say, okay, self, you have to model this behavior. And it doesn't mean that you can't fall back because we're humans and it happens.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
But the bar that I think we should all have is no matter what's going on in our lives, no matter what challenges, no matter what we're facing, is that there is always a way to grow through them, to become better, stronger, wiser, happier, to find more joy and peace and purpose.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And the tool that I'd give your listeners and your watchers comes from one of my mentors and another person that I dedicated the book to, Alan Mulally. And what Alan says is his hypothesis, after carefully studying manuscript and book, is that the first step to become shatterproof is what he calls a better way mindset.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And all that is, the simplest thing in the world, we just have to choose, is to believe that a better way exists. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Thanks for having me, John. Thrilled to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Well, I could talk to you for the entire 60-minute podcast about that. I actually, funnily enough, right before we started recording, I just got off the phone with him. We're talking about a friend's birthday party we're going to in a few weeks in New York. But Marshall came into my life when I was just finishing my first book, Bankable Leadership, in 2012.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And it was through a mutual connection who had been waiting to introduce me to Marshall until he deemed me ready. And I was ready upon publishing this book, trying to get it on the New York Times bestseller list and all the fun stuff that comes along with that. And the first conversation Marshall and I had did not go the way I thought it was going to go.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I thought it was going to be very calm, very nice. Oh, you're going to do great. helpful, loving, but very honest and truthful advice that actually completely reshaped the way I ended up bringing that book into the world. And also the way that I was thinking about my objectives around the process. That was how Marshall came into my life. That was a very long time ago now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And since then, he is everything from a mentor to someone that he and I coach CEOs together. So he's a colleague to somebody that I love going to a piano bar and having a glass of champagne and singing show tunes with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
So I think the biggest thing that Marshall has taught me is this, and this is a Peter Drucker quote that he often recites, which is that the purpose of life is not to prove how smart you are or how right you are, but to make a positive difference. And that's instilled in everything that I hope to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Well, one thing that Marshall says a lot that really resonates with me is that happiness and success are independent variables. And what that means to me is chasing success is not going to bring you happiness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
you have to if you want to be successful chase that if you want to be happy chase that but don't assume that there's a causal relationship and the way that comes into my new book shatterproof is a high level this book is for stressed out strivers people who have big ambitions who want to be the best version of themselves who want to contribute and make a positive difference
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
but they are increasingly weighed down by the demands that continue to come at them. And I think we can all agree that we live in a world where the world is going to just keep asking more of us. And so where I think Shatterproof comes into that concept is we spend so much time pushing, striving. I'm a terrible example of this this week. I was up until 5 a.m.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
yesterday writing my newsletter, which proves I am just as imperfect as all of us. But if we do that, we often do it at the expense of our own well-being, our own happiness, and more fundamentally, our own needs. And so what becoming shatterproof is all about is not sacrificing your success.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
It's finding a parallel path and a parallel skill set in order to feel better, do better, and live better that goes way beyond whatever it is we're accomplishing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
I can. Before I do that, if you would indulge me, this is what my agent calls a book with a two-part premise, right? The first premise is we have to deconstruct the myths of resilience, right? The things we expect it to do for us that scientifically it cannot do in order to introduce the idea of becoming shatterproof. But I'll be as efficient as I possibly can.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
The idea behind resilience, obviously, is it allows us to cope with difficult things. And it's generally defined by researchers as the capacity to either bounce back or to maintain our functioning during stressful events. Unfortunately, the hype around resilience, this really started in the early 90s. The research on resilience actually started as early as the 1950s and 1960s.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
has outpaced what scientifically it's proven resilience can do for us. So the three myths of resilience that I think lead us astray Number one, we believe that resilience is a tool that's gonna help us thrive, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
No matter what difficult or bad things are happening, if we practice gratitude, if we have a positive mindset, if we get social support, that we will actually get better and happier and stronger through challenges. But as I mentioned earlier, what resilience scientifically can do for us and what the most renowned resilience researchers say is that it exists to help us survive, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
There was one study that was done in Italy during COVID lockdowns, and they didn't define resilience as the ability to thrive through a global pandemic. They simply defined it as the absence of depression and anxiety. So the second myth is that our level of resilience is not just learnable, but wholly under our control. And what we know from the research on this is actually two things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Number one, in terms of the learnability This is not a slam dunk. There was one meta analysis, which is a study of studies. They looked at 45,000 data points of interventions designed to improve resilience. And they actually found that not only were those interventions not effective, But in many cases, they reduced the well-being of the trainees.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other studies that show that there are small effects. But by the way, there are usually only small effects. There are other studies that show no effect. So that's the first piece. The second piece is the people who need resilience most are the people who often have the fewest resources of resilience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
So examples of this might be people who went through early childhood trauma. It might be people who are living, as I do, with a chronic illness and disability. But the idea there is if we see resilience as wholly learnable and wholly under our control, it leads to something I call grit gaslighting, which is if you can't cope, maybe you just didn't spend enough time on that yoga mat.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Maybe you just didn't think positively enough. The third myth, and this one's actually pretty simple. The research shows that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is actually incorrect. The truth is when we're exposed to ongoing chronic stress, it actually depletes our resilience and makes coping and staying strong and not breaking even harder. So that's the landscape that we're in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
That's what we're dealing with here in terms of the myth versus the reality of resilience. Now you asked the question, how is being resilient different from being shatterproof? There's a couple of ways that I think this distinction makes sense. So where resilience is reactive, right? We wait for things to get better. We do our coping practices and our self-care.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
Becoming shatterproof is a new complementary skill set to resilience. that says we will get stronger through adversity if and only if we proactively harness it to grow right it bad things just happening to us does not magically make us more resilient but if we harness those events it can make us shatterproof The second distinction is that resilience can be pretty defensive, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
It focuses on endurance. It doesn't focus on upping our game. And it gets us back to the baseline of where we were. Becoming shatterproof is offensive. It gives us access to the best version of ourselves. And my and others' research on this shows that it increases meaning, personal growth, inner peace, even physical health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And then the last distinction that I actually think is in some way the most important is that resilience is a one-size-fits-all approach. No matter what you're going through, if you're optimistic, right? If you exercise, if you sleep a lot, if you engage in self-care and have a gratitude journal, that will help you cope.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
What's different about becoming shatterproof and specifically something I call the shatterproof roadmap, which is a four-step process to follow to become shatterproof, is that it's aimed at reducing the specific needs that you are not getting met. that are causing adversity to have an even worse effect on you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tasha Eurich on How to Create a Shatterproof Life | 592
And so I think you can think about those terms interchangeably, and they're not in contradiction with each other, but shatterproof is really a new scientifically supported skillset that can help us, especially when our resilience is running low.