CM 238: Rob Cross and Karen Dillon on How to Handle Microstress
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Can we reshape and can we recalibrate what success looks like? Can we stop letting other people define it for us? Can we let go of the success and the trappings and the steps in life that we think we're supposed to have and find something that is more personally meaningful to us? Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. Small things add up, and for the most part, that's a good thing, like taking the stairs to get more exercise or swapping out something sugary for a piece of fruit.

Over time, small actions like these can add up to a healthier lifestyle. Yet there are times when the small things that add up work against our well-being. Every time your boss shifts your priorities, each time you have to cancel connecting with a friend. Rob Cross and Karen Dillon take a closer look at these moments in their book, Microstress, How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems and What to Do About It.

They explain how these seemingly small stresses can, over time, have a damaging effect on our physical and emotional well-being. They also share effective ways to handle them. One quick ask, if you like the podcast, take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now, here's my interview with Rob Cross and Karen Dillon. Karen Dillon and Rob Cross, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having us.

What is microstress? Microstress is a word that we came up with after finding something really interesting in research about high performers. And microstress is small moments of stress that are caused by interactions with other people that are so small and so brief and worked into your day in such a seamless way that we almost don't notice them, but they add up, they accumulate, and cumulatively they take a big toll on us.

Tell us a little bit about that toll. What is the impact of this once you reach like a critical mass or a tipping point? What's the impact on our brains and our bodies?

Well, one of the interesting things about them is that they do not really register in the mind the way conventional stress would, right? It doesn't really invoke the fight or flight response. And these all feel to successful people like natural things that you need to get over and just work through, right? None of them are catastrophic. It's the volume, intensity, and pace that's really problematic of the number that are coming at us today.

And so when you hit certain points, it does though create metabolic changes. There's studies that we've come across that show that when you're under social stress like this, if you have a meal within two hours, you metabolize that meal with 104 more calories. And that adds up to 11 pounds a year if you're not watching it.

Blood pressure rises, all sorts of things physiologically happen as a product of the accumulation of these small moments, again, which our brains just don't seem to register in the same way. And so we're oftentimes unaware of the cumulative effect of these.

One interesting insight that we were given by neurologists we talked to was that our body doesn't necessarily distinguish between different forms of stress. Stress is stress and stress adds up. So while this may be small and brief moments of stress, it does cumulatively layer on itself. And she gave us a really great parallel. Think about children jumping on a bed. You had one and two and three and you get up to 10 children jumping on the bed and that bed frame is still holding. But somehow the 11th

child jumping on the bed will break it. That's a little bit about what microstress does to us. Each of those individual children, each of those individual microstresses may not feel like a big deal to add to the load, but at some point it is going to break. You, as you mentioned, conducted research, research on high performers. And as you talk about microstress in your book, you identified patterns in what causes microstress. Are there one or two patterns that you noticed maybe came up the most?

We identified three different categories of micro stressors. And so, you know, the first were those that drain our ability to get done what we have to get done, whether those interactions be professional or personal, they're, you know, taking away our ability to execute what we feel we need to.

And that creates stress because we're either under delivering or having to work further into the night and avoiding things that we prefer to be doing or family or friends or things like that. A second category that had to do with interactions that had emotional impact on us. And so this can be conflictual conversations, of course, but just as importantly, they can be concern for people you love and care about, you know, your team at work or your child or your aging parents.

And that was one of the really big distinguishers of this form of stress for us too, is that they are coming at us through relationships. So this is very different than just bad news on social media.

You know, the degree to which we like somebody magnifies the degree to which we feel that stress, the degree to which we dislike them magnifies the degree to which we feel that stress. And what was perhaps most poignant to us is a tremendous amount of it does come at us through people that we love and care about and has an impact emotionally.

And then the third category were interactions that were slowly pushing us away from who we set out to be in life to begin with. And they were just challenges to values, challenges to identity, being pushed to drive revenue excessively or to treat people in certain ways because of efficiencies you have to gain as a leader are examples of that over time.

I think the most common are the small interactions that drain our ability to get work done. It happens because of the degree to which so much work in organizations is collaborative today. That people just making small misses to efforts that you're worried about, that accumulates very quickly and creates a degree of stress that we haven't experienced in times gone by. When you give people advice for addressing those categories,

Is there any advice that comes to mind that tends to be maybe the most helpful or the most impactful?

One of the things I think people find really surprising, but it becomes kind of an aha moment for them is when we ask them to think not just about the micro stresses that they're enduring and the sources of it and possibly ways that they can think about pushing back on it, but to think about the micro stresses they are actually causing for others. We don't like to think about that. We definitely don't do it deliberately, but we are, if you pause and think about it, we are likely causing micro stress for other people.

And the reason that's so bad, not just because you don't want to be that kind of person as a boss, as a sibling, as a child, as a parent, but because microstress almost always boomerangs back on us. So if you were triggering it for someone else, it is likely to rebound back on you in time.

So, for example, if you're pushing an employee particularly hard that reports to you, one of your best employees, the one you know you can count on for anything, but you're kind of unaware of the layers of microstress you're causing for that person, you may risk that person burning out or worse, choosing to leave your organization, which will rebound back on you. So I think one of the biggest surprises for people is it's not just others who are doing it to you. You are doing it to others. And that hurts everyone.

Another example of things that we see people do is really not getting caught in the minutia. So some of the stories as we went through the interviews that were just the worst stories tended to be people that had gotten too unidimensional in their lives. And it just all became about purely work or work and family. And that was really all they had.

in different ways. And so when things went wrong in that one of those spheres, you just experience the stress, right? It gets magnified and you're kind of down in the minutia in different ways. So one of the things we could see is the people that did better, they were better at adapting interactions to remove some of the micro stress. They were better at not causing micro stress, but they also had an ability to rise above it in

in different ways. And most people have had the experience of, you know, grumbling about how bad life is now crazy everybody else is and just on and on and on. And then something truly traumatic happens, you know, a health scare or somebody passes away or something that's really serious. And you look back on things that all mattered 10 seconds ago, wondering why in the world did I care? You

You know, why was that important to begin with? And what we could see is a certain subset of the people in our interviews tended to live that way without the stress. And the way they tended to do that was a product of typically being involved with at least two and usually three groups they were an authentic part of outside of their profession.

um in those groups you know were usually pursuing some kind of activity sometimes it was music you know athletics book clubs things like that but they just created a perspective on life because of the diversity of opinions and people that you were put in context with friendships you know a range of other things that mattered that really tried you know created a context where you didn't experience the stress right

right as much. And we think that's a really critical thing because the way in which our worlds are so hyper-connected today, there's certain things you can do to stop some of this. There's certain things you can do to stop causing some of it, but there also has to be an ability to kind of rise above it. The certain kind of micro-stress that you talk about, one of the ways that shows up is to emotionally drain us. And you both have mentioned that.

One of the ways that this comes up is caretaking, caring for others, whether that's at home or at work. Can you share an example and walk us through one of the ways we can maybe manage this? I think a lot of us are in that situation, whether it's with young children, whether it's with older members of a family, even friends.

I can give you an example from my own life, which is that my parents both are aging and have health issues and are beyond the point of being able to completely care for themselves on a day-to-day basis. And with very good intentions, my sister and I sometimes just manage to get under each other's skin when we're trying to talk about what we care about for our parents or doing something for our parents. And so the end of a conversation about who's going to take off from work on Friday to take dad to an appointment or what's

whether X or Y, Z thing is the right thing to do. Two sisters who love each other, who care about each other and care deeply about their parents, you can end up feeling bad. You've drained your emotional reserves from having that simple conversation. We're not talking necessarily about toxic relationships or really jerky people in your life. You're talking about

people that you love, who you care about and vice versa, where somehow the interaction with them just ends up being emotionally draining. And I think we've all felt it with family members. We felt it with people at work that we care about. It's because we care about them that it sort of heightens the emotional complexity of it and is draining to us.

I would throw one on there as well from the other end of the spectrum and with our children. And in my own life, my daughter is somebody that I, she was a high-end junior tennis player. And as she went through that experience and I was with her in a lot of the tournaments around the country, she just developed this knee-jerk reaction to rely on me as a source of resilience, right? When things were going wrong, she would be, I would be the first one that would hear it.

You know, we would talk about it and figure out how to get things done. And that interaction persisted, you know, well into her adult life where I would just get texts that would take her all of 10 seconds probably to write and just send on. And she'd be over by second 15. But I would, you know, in the back of my mind, be worrying about this stuff for three, four hours.

until I had a chance to connect with her. And we finally discovered this one night that these were just, it was just an entrenched behavior in the interaction. And I really wanna pick up on that word that Karen was just using because a lot of times people are looking at the relationships

and not the interactions that are happening within them, right? And you can be in the same relationship and have very positive elements. Rachel is a source of purpose, humor, wonderful things, but she can also be in different ways sources of micro stress. And I'm sure most parents have this experience as well.

And what we found, even in that simple interactions, I just said, Rachel, cut it out. You're killing me. And, you know, she stopped and thought about, OK, when I really need that, he's there in a heartbeat and I'll tell him. But when I don't, I can stop doing that in a way that was having impact on him. I think we have tremendous latitude to do an awful lot of that in relationships enmeshed in our lives in ways that can have a pretty material impact quickly for us.

I'm glad you shared sort of how you handled that. Karen, I'm curious, how have you handled your situation? In my case, it actually, we had a very constructive lunch with my sister and my brother who was less involved. And we just kind of started to try to get on the same page because we were always having interactions that were about making decisions on the fly, you know, driving home in a car or things like that, when we actually started to sit together and start to plan and sort of

I almost articulated some of the things that we were feeling without knowing if the others were on the same page. I work full time and my sister doesn't, for example. So I explained to her that I always feel bad that I'm imposing on her and she feels bad that she's imposing on me. I think once when we kind of

checked in with each other, and then we figured out a path forward, the sort of big decisions, a plan for communicating about things as opposed to similar to Rob, kind of in the moment, sending a text off or calling and making this decision on a fly. When we began to think about it coherently as a group to try to make better decisions together, that just ratcheted that micro stress right down for all of us, I think.

So a lot of communication and really kind of focusing on the relationship that you have with each other in order to be able to work together on those other relationships. And removing the interactions that were causing those moments of microstress. So instead of a car ride home call when we're agitated about something, waiting and calling at a scheduled time or just similar to Rob's, just thinking about how and when we're choosing to have that communication to make it a less microstress filled transaction.

You know, it's so interesting as I listened to both of you, part of what I'm hearing is the tools that have allowed us to be even more hyper-connected have so many upsides to them, but they also give us permission to reach out maybe more quickly than we should. And putting some guardrails around that can be really helpful.

Very much. I think it's the intentionality of the use of the tools. I mean, the fascinating thing to us is the reality is we've never had more ability to shape what we do and who we do it with. And yet we're at unprecedented levels of burnout and disengagement. And you go through these interviews like we did, and they're all highly successful people. And so you would expect life to be grand and great and great companies, right? Highly successful in those companies.

And the first 10 minutes were great, you know, in the discussions, everything was rainbows and lollipops. And then you get down to minute 30 and you start to see the cracks come in a minute 45. And it just progressively, you know, got worse for a lot of the people. Some people it didn't, but for a lot it did. And I think a lot of it is the, you know, giving up, being proactive and being intentional.

And how you're managing the connections and how you're managing the interactions within them and falling into reactive postures and kind of knee jerk ways of reacting to others, whether that be professionally or personally, that really takes us into a bad place over time. We're learning that stress is contagious. Are there ways to support others in their stress but not be taken over by what they're feeling?

I think one of the things we find is being empathetic, like clearly is something that kind of starts to allow people to say, yes, this feeling is validated. What we would hear very frequently, though, was being clear on what's the impact of the stress on others. Right. And you can kind of start with the impact on yourself and then show the effect on others.

And just kind of engaging in the dialogue around that over time was one of the strategies that we heard that had a pretty remarkable impact, I think, on getting people to feel heard, but then also understand that the way they're manifesting that stress is just propagating it, you know, with others in ways that's not helpful.

One of the other insights that we had from the research is that the people who were better at dealing with this, not letting the sort of secondhand stress derail them, helped those people be part of other groups of conversations and networks. For example, if you only ever are

Coming home and unloading your stress on your spouse, at some point, that's not going to be healthy for either of you, right? The spouse is either going to be completely sympathetic to you and sort of almost reinforce what built you up feeling that stressful in the first place, or maybe even get sort of annoyed and not have enough time to sort of hear you. The more people had diverse set of connections in their lives, the more they were able to build resilience and resilience.

find ways to not let the stress get them down, whether firsthand stress or secondhand stress. It's really important to have a diverse set of connections in your life rather than relying on one or two people to always be your outlet for that stress. If you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week's book, sign up for our newsletter, the one, two, three, by heading to my website, gailallen.net.

Each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to win our most recent guest's book. Before we release the next episode, we'll send the winner their free copy and give them a shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Nella from Amsterdam. Congratulations, Nella. We'll be sending you a copy of Elaine Fox's book, Switchcraft. What's the 123 newsletter? It's one topic, two insights, and three actions you can take. Now back to my interview with Rob Cross and Karen Dillon.

It's interesting because you've mentioned a couple things, both of you, about how high performers who effectively manage microstress, how they handle it. What else do they maybe avoid doing or what other patterns came up for you in speaking with them about what they effectively do?

One of the interesting things as we went through the interviews, I mentioned that, you know, probably 90% of the discussions we would have would go negative, you know, and you would see the stress kind of emerge for people. And yet about 10% didn't, right? And those became very interesting to us because these were people that were outperforming and really thriving, you know, in the way they were putting their lives together and integrating kind of work and projects.

profession. One idea I mentioned already is that they were far more likely to have and maintain authentic connection with at least two and usually three groups outside of their profession, right? And that helps to ameliorate stress. Another that we could clearly see is really tying to what Karen was just saying as well, is they were better at understanding how they needed to tap others for, you know, resilience. So if you ask a whole bunch of people, hundreds of people,

about how you made it through difficult stretches in your life, whether that be I didn't get the promotion to my spouse died of pancreatic cancer.

And you focus not on what they did to get through, like that's our conventional view of resilience is we're tough and we have grit and fortitude and things like that, but rather how they turn to others and what they got from others. If you do that, you hear pretty predictably that people leverage others for seven benefits in the interactions. It's empathy, it's perspective in a situation, it's seeing a path forward. For many, it was humor and the ability to invoke humor quickly in situations that

But the people that had and knew how to use those interactions around them, they'd cultivated the right relationships and they were attuned enough to themselves to know what mattered at what point. They did much better. They just don't experience, again, the stress in the same way as the people that either don't have those connections or to Karen's point, they're just looking for empathy. And they go to the same person over and over again that in the case of a spouse, oftentimes is actually making you more frustrated because all they know is your side of the story.

Right. And not how do you kind of get out of the position that you're in? I want to talk a little bit more about the resilience component that you mentioned. But before I do that, there's something you write about in the book. When high performers have to be reactive, they also handle things in a certain way. Everybody's put on the spot at different times. Emergencies come up. But when they have to be reactive, how do they handle themselves? What can we learn from that?

They're good at a few things, actually. One of the things they're really good at is making clear to whoever's making the ask of them or whatever the team is that they're working on. They have better practices and habits to make sure they're communicating what the implication of this is, what this toll is going to take for doing this.

They're good at not sort of leaving the room with ambiguity over who's doing what. They are kind of proactive when given a reactive response that they have to do to something. They're proactive in making sure that they are maximizing their ability to get it done well. And part of that involves communication. Part of that involves making sure everyone's on the same page.

They just are better at practicing the kind of good skills of alignment with their colleagues and peers in a way that makes it less likely that they're going to be set up to fail with whatever they're trying to respond to. And second, they're also better at kind of having a network of people they can tap to help them.

whether it's to put this in perspective or get advice on this or give them some guidance on how they might do it differently. They don't rely on sort of just being a superhero or Herculean efforts to get it done. They realize that they can tap other people to help them in some way. It's part of the resilience skill that Rob was just talking about to get things done. So they're sort of never struggling alone. So I want to build on what you've just said. Creating a resilience network is something that comes up and you all have mentioned it a couple of times.

If I'm going to build a resilience network, and clearly it's an important component to help me manage micro-strafts, what is it? What does it look like? What are the kinds of people or who are the kinds of people I might want to include? Who might I want to make sure I leave out? How do I think about this?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I would really refer to Robin Dunbar's work on this and the degree to which we have connections around us that seem to layer out. So people have oftentimes heard of the Dunbar number of

of 500 people that we can recognize and may go sit by in a crowded airport. But what was interesting about what he found is we tend to have one and a half intimates, right? And there's one and a half because men have one, women have two, right? A spouse and a BFF.

And then five people were close to, and then 12 to 15 that we would invite over for dinner. And then 50 to 100, the 50 being, you know, you'd have over for a barbecue, the 100 being you'd invite to a wedding. But there are different degrees of both emotional closeness and time in the interactions. And what we're seeing in this is you can't just turn to your significant other or your parents for everything.

Right. What's happened is a lot of these voluntary interactions have fallen off and that's put more pressure on the close in relationships. And you definitely need that. Right. You definitely need those are the people that will give you unstinting emotional support, financial support if you needed other things like that.

But resilience is formed in outer tiers as well. So one of our favorite interviews was a neurosurgeon at one of the most respected research hospitals in the world and very austere, brilliant man, you know, and he contacted me in this case several months after we had discussions around this. And he said, you know, Rob, I'm happier than I've ever been or some variant of that. And he said, I went into a music store because I was going to start playing guitar again. And I came by a flyer that said,

said we're looking for somebody to play guitar for us in this band and what we lack for in quality we make up for in volume or something like that.

And he joined this rock band, right, that he had used to play guitar in high school. He'd given it up. But what he was telling us is it was fun to be in the rock band, right, as a different part of his identity. But it was putting him in the context of 20 year olds, that he was laughing at things. And he just realized that, you know, certain things were not as important in his world as it could get built up in his mind as he would go day in and day out.

So I think, you know, resilience certainly comes from those close connections, but a knee jerk reaction to think that that's all we need or the only place we can get it is misplaced. And I also think it's a mistake to think that resilience is reactive only.

right? It's only when I'm in trouble that I reach out to others because that neurosurgeon is getting resilience from those interactions, right? It's creating perspective, it's creating humor, it's doing other things that isn't necessarily in response to a crisis, but it's making him more resilient, right? And we would find a ton of evidence of things like that that weren't just coming through the closest relationships in their lives.

It's really interesting what you're both sharing because when we get stressed and when we're experiencing a lot of micro stress, our first reaction is often to double down. As you said, we make our world a little bit smaller, a little bit smaller because we think if we remove maybe the chaos or the outside impact, it'll calm us down. And it's very clear in listening to you both that there's almost like a

barrier we have to overcome and realize that we actually have to kind of broaden that perspective. And the way to do that is not to double down on kind of current state. Is that accurate? I very much believe so. And I'll jump in with two ideas and then Karen, you know, you should weigh in as well. But I believe that the more that we are transparent with things, the more that

resources tend to flow to us. So right at those points where we think we need to shut down, handle it, get through a situation, you would oftentimes find people that were willing to be vulnerable at an appropriate level, suddenly create conditions where things flow to them, right through the connections around them, whether that be empathy, support, help, laughter, whatever it may be.

And so I think that's one important lesson. The other one that really emerged for me is people going through times of transition where there's a tendency a lot of times to say, okay, I'm going to make this move. I'm going to accept this new job and life's just going to stink for the next 12 months or 18 months. I'm going to go home and tell my family this. Don't expect to see me. And I'm going to set all these precedents that all I'm going to do is focus on work.

and then I'll get back into my life later on. And the reality is, and I'm sure you see it coming, very infrequently do people get their life back, right? They just became narrower versions of themselves at each of those transitional points. In contrast, we would see the 10 percenters, the happier people in our work,

would go into those transitions and say, I'm going to make this transition and make it create a larger version of myself. So they didn't just hone in and become more narrow. They would say, gosh, who do I want to be in this next phase? And think, you know, in much broader terms. And they would do better, you know, over time in different ways.

I would just add that some people think of that as kind of nice to have, to have these extra connections and being part of groups and organizations that sort of add dimensionality to your life. I think of it differently now from doing this work with Rob. I think it's, you need to have it. It's really important to have that to feed your overall wellbeing. And so for me, I think a really big lesson of watching the people who are good at this versus people who are less good at this is that working these connections, however small moments, however you find it,

the ability to work it into your life is really important for your wellbeing. It's not just nice for some people, it's important and it's necessary. There was an expression somebody used in one of the interviews I thought was so interesting. I've been trying to just get me through this week for the past two years straight. The more myopic we become, put your head down, focus on things,

the smaller the rest of your life and the context becomes and the less you have the ability to tap into those forms of resilience and keep your physical well-being going and even finding purpose in some of those small moments. So this is a need to have, not a nice to have. You also point out in the book that health and taking care of yourself are just crucial. Say a little bit about those.

Well, we know, you know, just basic physical health is one of the, you know, antidotes to stress in different ways. What we focused on in the book was not just the act of being physically healthy, but really understanding what the role of

connections around us were in motivating us to show up and why they tended to matter. And so it actually was one of the very first interviews we did that got us really focused on this work. It was a life science executive in London who, you know, we just asked, can you tell us about a time in your life when you're becoming more physically healthy and what was the role of connections around you? And she kind of chuckled in this lovely British accent and

said, you know, I was the person in high school that dodged gym at every chance, right? I didn't want to get involved in any physical activity. And that worked for me up until kind of, you know, late 30s, early 40s, which is when people generally see their health decline. You know, statistically, we can see that other work we've done shows it's a product of falling out of the activities and groups they were a part of as professional responsibilities and personal responsibilities peak.

But what she told us was a story of saying, okay, you know, I'm going to start getting a little better control of my health. So I started walking around this park in London right outside my flat. And then I bumped into a couple of people that were walking the same day and we decided to walk a little further. And then that walk turned into a charity walk and then a charity run. And, you know, you flash forward 10 years to when we were talking with her and she was doing marathons with her husband, right? They would actually plan vacations where they would do a marathon with

uh first and and this was the person that dodged jim in high school right and what she said is the identity of being a runner or whatever it is right cyclist tennis player walker you know vegan doesn't matter right but the identity of that kind of pushes back on that extra five emails at a certain point

but that the real key was situating that activity in a group of other people. So suddenly she was hanging out with the male person, IT executive, others that just brought different perspectives into her life. They both became friendships that kept her accountable, but also created that dimensionality that we're talking about

outside. So with health, the key thing that I'm always really urging people is to think about not how do you go run in the morning by yourself, but put that activity in a set of connections that's going to pull you into a broader life, right? And a different way of doing things. And I think that's one of the most important success factors in this. What role do meaning and purpose play? And what do these look like for high performers who manage microstress well?

Well, for all of us, finding meaning and purpose is really important, right? It's a sort of reason to get out of bed in the morning. But for too many people, you know, particularly high performers, not necessarily the ones who are good at doing this, we get caught up in trying to live the life that we're supposed to want, you know, the career success or the trappings of success. And that in the course, you know, little by little following that path, so many people lose a sense of meaning for, you know, who they are, what they're doing in this world and purpose.

And I think what happens often is people think that meaning and purpose have to be found in really big lofty goals, right? I have to cure cancer or I have to, you know, go spend a year in the Peace Corps for me to have meaning and purpose in my life. And what we found with the people who were particularly good at doing this, we started calling them the 10 percenters because they were the top 10 percent of people with dealing with micro stress, is that they were able to find

meaning and purpose in small moments, in small interactions with other people. You didn't have to cure cancer, but you might stop and have a meaningful conversation with a junior colleague to help them get unstuck on something. Or they might be able to feel like they were playing a really important role in their extended family in some way in keeping people together. There can be meaning and purpose in small ways, in small moments.

And I think sort of resetting that expectation that it doesn't have to be this big, consuming, overwhelming thing. You can continue doing work that's difficult and maybe a job that isn't completely aligned with who you are and add meaning and purpose into that experience in some ways. We talked to people, for example, who found ways to organize some pro bono work within their company.

or they became a mentor to junior people, there were ways that they could add meaning and purpose in smaller interactions that helped enormously, again, keep the microstress of the rest of it in perspective. So meaning and purpose is really important

reason to get out of bed in the morning. And if we only look at big lofty things, we're never going to be able to do that well in the morning. And the people who did this well were ones who found it in everyday interactions. Yeah. I'm really glad that you touched on the small moments piece and also helping others, co-creating with others. It's that idea of kind of getting out of your own head, getting out of yourself a little bit.

I think a lot of us can relate to that. That for me, co-creating with others is one of my sources of meaning and purpose. And it took me a long time to recognize that was real. That was actually a sense of meaning and purpose. I really love collaborating with other people and bringing out the best in each other and creating something we're proud of. And most of us have had that experience at work at some point in our lives. And that feels great. We know what that feels like. That can be a really powerful source of that motivation. It doesn't have to be something really big. And so I think finding those small ways to find it is really powerful.

You all shared stories, personal stories earlier in the interview. And I was curious to ask you, whenever you do this kind of research, I'm assuming that part of the reason you write a book about it is because you're really struck by it and perhaps even try to incorporate some of those things into your own lives. And you both mentioned two examples of that. Any other steps that you've both taken in handling your own micro stress that you think would be helpful for people to learn about?

I'll start because it was Rob and I were kind of a living experiment as we were writing this book. We were writing the book really during the height of the pandemic and micro stresses for all of us were really enormous during the pandemic. And we both really started trying to practice what we were talking about and

And for me personally, one of the things I did was I have two really close friends from college who live within an hour's drive of my house, for whom life had gotten busy for us all and we hadn't really seen each other as much. And we kind of checked in, but not very much. During the pandemic, we started making a habit of meeting in outdoor locations. We didn't know what the boundaries of what we were allowed to do with COVID or not was with people.

It's funny now, we would go hiking in the woods with masks on, but we started making a regular point of doing that together. And not only was that good for our physical wellbeing, as we talked about earlier, but we just reconnected with each other in ways that were really powerful. And that built back to a really great place where we're now...

X years later are very close to each other and in each other's lives. And we can send funny memes, all the things we talked about. We got our relationship back to that point because we made that effort to, you know, on a couple, every couple of weeks, find time for each other and do something physical. And that led to so many great things.

It's a great example. Rob, do you have one to share as well? Yeah. So for me, the dimensionality and creating that was probably the most impactful thing from the interviews. And it was because people far too often would tell stories, as we've dug into the interviews, of three, five, eight years of their lives where they thought they were doing great things and suddenly woke up.

and realized that they weren't who they wanted to be. Right. And so for me, really kind of stepping back and thinking intentionally about what domains of my life with others do I want to build out physically? So I'm a cyclist and

and play tennis and that's pulled me into groups spiritually as a member of a church in my case um intellectually there's certain things i'm pulling out and actually musically i just started playing to many people's chagrin the mandolin as a way to kind of pull into to different spheres um

And so those have been really important to me to create this dimensionality, right, and to not get hunkered down. I will say just one thought that I have for the audience here is when we would hear people being stressed, you know, as a product of COVID, a lot of it is because stress has risen, like through the pandemic. But part of the experience is because we've been pulled out of these groups that kept us whole to begin with, with social distancing, right?

And what we would see were three strategies that I would hold on to. One is to reach back to a passion from the past and use that to slingshot yourself forward into a new group. So me with cycling as an example, Karen with hiking, it was a different strategy of kind of reigniting dormant ties. But there are different ways to do it, right, without just saying, OK, I have to go meet friends at a bar somewhere. Right.

The second strategy was what Karen did, right? Reach back to ties that are non-dormant and find an activity to pull them together. And the third was one that we've alluded to already. Look for ways to take the activity that you're already doing, not the big thing like Karen was saying, but the small things you're already doing and pivot them slightly in a way that pulls you into connections that matter to you. So maybe rather than running for a personal best on the 10K, you start running with a child, their best friend, and the parent of that best friend.

You do things that are using that same activity to pull you into relationships that matter. And you find that getting that dimensionality in your life has a tremendous impact on well-being and the way you experience a lot of the stress coming at you. The theme of the podcast is curiosity. What are you most curious about today?

That's a really interesting question. There's so much that I'm curious about, but from this research, I guess I'm really curious about how people will gauge the success of their life. Can we reshape and can we recalibrate what success looks like? And can we stop kind of letting other people define it for us? Can we let go of the success and the trappings and the steps in life that we think we're supposed to have and find something that is more personally meaningful to us?

So I would echo that in a really significant way because I see as a college professor, I see that far too often at the youngest ages. You know, success has been defined by what we've seen our parents do and then all the reinforcements around the groups that we get into through social media.

and so i hope that that's a big component of this and i would love to see this work drift into high schools you know over time and have impact there i think the second thing for me is i'd really love to get greater and greater understandings of the clinical effect

of the ability to manage stress in this way differently. And so we're starting studies with clinicians and hospitals and other things like that. And you can imagine, you can't solve all the problems, but if you could keep people from going into clinical categories of care, just because they manage the connections around them a little bit differently and what they were getting from those interactions, that would be a fantastic win if we could better understand how to do that.

What have I not gotten to? What have I not asked you both that you want to be able to speak to as we wrap things up? It's not that you didn't ask, but I guess it's a point I would really emphasize in something that Karen spoke to already. But that to me is the power of the small moment and really paying attention to how you're choosing day in and day out and then small moments either to engage

in ways that create a sense of energy and purpose around you or not. You know, and I can't emphasize the same thing that Karen said, the degree to which our happier people, they weren't defined by hiking the Himalayas, right? Or something that was going to come to them with the next promotion two years over the horizon. They were defined by how they choose to show up, you know, and live kind of authentically, be more present in interaction with others. You know, it was the interactions themselves that were really a key source of,

kind of engagement and purpose. And so I would, you know, really emphasize that as a source of well-being that we all have the ability to actually lean into pretty quickly. I think that's a really, really helpful one. And it's a great note to end on. I can't thank you both enough. It's been such a pleasure to speak with you both. And what a terrific book. Thank you, Gail. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Makebelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's Robert Shiller's online course, Narrative Economics. Shiller shares how stories have influenced how we live and make decisions, particularly when it comes to how we spend and invest. He's also a co-founder of the Innovator Circle,

He traces the impact of stories over time, shares key traits of powerful narratives, and reveals the kinds of narratives that circle back again and again. I got so much from this course.