How to Thrive in a Rapidly-Changing Work World | Gabriella Rosen Kellerman

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Jonathan Fields: [00:00:13] So how do you get through each day, let alone build a meaningful, connected, and rewarding career? When rapid fire, constant change, groundlessness, unrelenting pace, overwhelm, and even workplace toxicity have seemingly become more and more the norm. Well, that's where we're headed with my guest today, Gabriela Rosanne Kellerman, an author, entrepreneur, startup executive, and Harvard trained physician with expertise in behavioral and organizational change, digital health, well-being, and AI. Gabriela began her career in psychiatry and fMRI research, looking at people's brains, and she is the founding CEO of the healthcare technology company Lifelink and has served as Chief product Officer and Chief innovation Officer at Betterup, a transformation platform for global professionals, and is head of Betterup Labs. In her new book, Tomorrow Mind, which was co-authored by renowned psychologist Martin Seligman, also known as the Father of Positive Psychology. She offers critical insights for facing a wildly fluctuating, seemingly perpetually unstable and challenging future of work. So excited to share this conversation with you. Let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. Hey, and before we dive into today's episode, a quick share. So if you're a coach, a consultant or a leader, and you would just love to stand out more in 2024 and beyond, with a powerful new credential and a set of results driven superpowers, we have got something for you. With nearly a million people now discovering their profiles, the Sparketypes have become a global phenomenon. People want their work to light them up, and oftentimes they would love some help along the way, which is why we developed our certified Sparketype advisor training.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:07] As a certified advisor, you will discover cutting edge tools that spark profound work life client transformations. Stand out with a highly unique credential and skill set in a crowded market. Find ease and flexibility with templated engagement flows. You'll become a part of a global network of change makers, and you'll rack up 40 ICF continuing education credits. Our fall cohort is enrolling now with visionaries just like you, and we would love to invite you to uplevel your capabilities as a coach or consultant or leader by becoming a certified Sparketype advisor. To learn more about the fall training and see if it's right for you, just click the link in the show notes now or visit sparketype.com. Slash pros. I am deeply fascinated by both the work that you're doing around wellness in the workplace, and also your own personal career trajectory. You started at Harvard. You end up at Mount Sinai, New York, in med school. You come out of there, you're at UCSD in Southern California doing a residency. And it seems like psychiatry in the way that the brain works is a real deep fascination. It becomes really the center of so much of the work that you're doing in the medical field. For from my understanding, it's the better part of a decade. Then you make this really interesting change. Medicine is one of these fields that a lot of people don't walk away from. So when I meet somebody who did, I want to know what happened.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:03:38] It was the only time in my career that I lacked something without being pulled toward something else. I knew that it was not right, and I'll tell you why. But I didn't know what I was going to, and it was terrifying for all the reasons you can imagine. Financial. It was a major identity shift, so I had gone into medicine to be a psychiatrist. And the reason was that I was fascinated with the brain. And intellectually, I remained captivated. I think it's the frontier of knowledge. Is knowledge of knowledge itself. What could be more worthwhile? And then on the emotional side, from a pretty young age, I knew that I wanted to help people with psychological well-being and emotional suffering. It bothered me then. It bothers me now that we have all of this science that's let us live longer, and all of this technology that has improved the standard of living. But our lived experience arguably has not moved in terms of our well-being and our happiness since we evolved. And so that is to me, the challenge, the problem. And psychiatry was my first guess at where to work on that, and I had a lot of inputs leading to that. And when I got to the point of doing what I would do for the rest of my career, clinical practice and psychiatry and academic research studying the brain with fMRI, I just hit this wall of there's not enough innovation happening here, and I'm really worried for my own well-being about what's going to happen to me if I stay. I didn't know where else to go, and the truth is that leaving medicine is not as terrifying as it sounds, because you can always go back.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:05:24] You know, I had enough training. I had my license. There is a path back. But when I knew deep inside myself that if I did have to go back, it wouldn't be because I wanted to. It would be because I couldn't find the thing. You know, that that was pretty terrifying. It took me a long time to find the tech sector. I did a lot of experimentation, and all of these signals started pointing me there. So I was doing some journalism, trying to follow the news stories on where exciting things happening around wellbeing. It was leading me to tech. I was doing some consulting work for different companies. All of the exciting and innovative things they were doing was related to tech, and even as I kept up my clinical work, I shifted over to a county mental health facility, which I loved. Working with that population. They were under a major budget crunch, and the way that they solve for that, they had to shut down a lot of their satellite mental health clinics. Was they hooked up this crazy, awkward telemedicine situation with like a cubicle TV and, you know, a tangle of wires. But that was how we gave access to care to hundreds, if not thousands of people all around the county who no longer had local places to go. So all of that for me was this light bulb moment around, okay, this is there's a huge opportunity here to really innovate with these tools. It was starting to happen in health in general, but not yet in behavioral health. But I could see how quick and easy that would be to translate into, you know, my space. And that was that was it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:58] You said that was it as if, you know, like and and then we were off to the races and it was just fairly straightforward after that, which it never is. But um, so as you sort of you're running the experiments and you're, you're trying on different things from journalism to tech, you become more deeper and deeper into tech. A large chunk of your time now has been spent with this organization. Better up some blend of chief Product officer, chief Innovation officer. And it sounds like a big a big amount of the time, heading up effectively an in-house private lab at Arab Labs, which is saying, okay, let's look at behavioral change, behavioral design at scale and especially in the context of the workplace. Tell me what what drew you to this?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:07:42] Yeah. So I first met the founders of Betterup when I was working at a company called Castlight Health. I was leading a behavioral health product at Castlight Health, and it was one of the first, if not the first, on the market that combined software with a virtually mediated therapy relationship to try to say, okay, how can we use these technologies combined with the human to help people grow that product, like most of the products on the market that support our well-being? It has the word health in it. We think of it as related to either helping treat a mental health condition, or maybe helping us avoid a mental health condition, but it has this sense of almost remediation because of its categorization within healthcare, and also because the way that employers think about a product like that is as close to healthcare. And it's really about limiting spend on medical costs, all of which meant that, and continues to mean it's very hard to get people excited about a product like that. It's very hard to capture, you know, motivation, energy, especially from people who have ideas about themselves that don't mesh with the idea of working on your psychological well-being.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:09:09] Right. And what the founders of Battyrap were coming and sharing with me was, hey, we have an opportunity to do this with a really different kind of a brand and energy. It's much more aspirational. It's much more about performance. It's much more about achieving your goals than about, quote unquote, fixing something. And the reality is the work is very, very similar, whether you're doing it under the auspices of a behavioral health product or a professional coaching product. Great coaches will tell you so much of executive coaching is about emotional regulation. You know all of this, of course. So to me, that was because I'd been trying so hard to crack the code on engagement with this product and get people to use it more. That was like a big aha of, oh, it's like a complete frame shift, mindset shift, aspirational energy, align it with my career and where I want to go, where I'm already feeling a ton of motivation and that's why I got on board. I was an advisor for a couple of years first, and then I joined on full time as an employee in 2017.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:18] Yeah. And I mean, it is so interesting how people will devote time, energy and resources to doing something when their brains can kind of make an apples for apples comparison and say, like, if I do x, Y, and Z, there's a high likelihood that it will help me with this other thing that I can kind of measure and be rewarded for in a professional context, but if you told them or invited them to say yes and allocate the same time, energy and resources and then said, and the benefit will be, you know, like you'll feel more relaxed and resilient and calmer and healthier and it's so much harder. You know, behavior change is we are weird when it comes to investing in behavior change and the reasons that we say yes to it.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:11:06] 100%, I think a lot. And I imagine you do as well, about what has been like to live in a time where religion was a larger influence and spirituality was a larger influence on people's lives, because it was not the express purpose was not to support wellbeing, but so much of religious communities can and often do support wellbeing. And so there are people were devoting a lot of time to these practices for that reason versus today. You know, our motivations tend to be more about the self, more about our own ambitions. And so what was it about that era in that structure that brought that out in us? And how can we elicit that same, that same commitment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:52] So much of that? And you're right. I think about this all the time, too. It sounds like there'll probably be a whole separate conversation between us. But I think it's fascinating because so much of that was people would literally build their entire lives and invest so much time and energy around the notion of a social contract. You know, where, sure. Like, you kind of knew that you were getting something out of it. But a really big part of it was being a meaningful and, like, conscious and intentional contributor to the larger whole. And I agree, I think so much of that has been lost over the last generation or two, and so many of the places that people would turn to for that feeling and that opportunity to contribute, they're not doing the same thing anymore. Robert Putnam wrote about this in Bowling Alone like years ago. Sort of like the demise of the way that we gather and and belonging along with it, and all the needs that that satisfies. We become so individualistic. And maybe that's actually helping us check boxes in our individual, like rising up the ladder thing. But I feel like we just we spend so little time looking at like, what is the trade off?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:12:59] Yeah, every model of well-being, every every model of what puts you at risk for psychological illness, early death. It's all about connection, right? It's not only connection, but, um, there's no model of well-being that doesn't include relationships, meaningful connection with others as a pillar. So it's certainly at our own to our own detriment, that we lose those communities and don't take the time to invest and value. You know, I think the literature is really clear on it. How can we set ourselves up with lifestyles that are more conducive to that? I think is something that we're not yet at a collective level of motivation around.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:44] Yeah, certainly. And the work that you have done, the work that you've done in collaboration with Marty Seligman and certainly the work that Marty has been doing for, I guess, since early 90s now has really helped. I think so many people reimagine what actually is thriving. What is wellbeing? Even his early life model, so many people shorthand is perma, you know, and then the work that's been done after it where people start to add like one more thing, it's perma v and now it's perma plus four and like and even like that, the early ideas were starting to say, okay, so there are models of well-being, but this is like a dynamic framework. Let's keep investigating and challenging and kicking the tires and adding things to it. I feel like we do know so much more about, like, what are those contributors to human flourishing these days? And yet still it's not guiding a whole lot of decision making and action taking.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:14:34] I mean, that's part of the call to action. For our book, to be honest, is to say we are at a tremendously important inflection point in the world of work. It's a historic labor transformation we're going through. We know today that these labor transformations can be very harmful to our well-being as a species, and we have evidence from previous major labor transformations. Are we going to sit around and let the same thing happen, or are we going to make use of this science that exists? By no means is this science all done. There's lots more to do, but we have four solid decades of research on how to do this, and it's only been increasing exponentially in the latter. You know, the last decade and a half in terms of the volume of studies, we have the data that we need to avoid those negative outcomes and also to use this as an opportunity to thrive, to achieve great things, to make this these moments of change into moments of opportunity. Like what are we waiting for? Let's do it. So that's our call to arms with the buck.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:46] Yeah, I love it. You know, the workplace can be a source of great suffering, but also great expansion and abundance and thriving. Um, you referenced the fact that work has become really challenging in a lot of ways. And I feel like the last couple of years have certainly, you know, it's interesting. I think a lot of people feel like it's made it a lot more challenging. But what I see, it's just made a lot of the problems that have been there for a really long time that much more apparent to so many. And then it surfaced them on, on a level where people are saying, I actually have to deal with this, been this long standing big mismatch that you write about and you talk about between really the way that we're wired to handle the challenges of work and the way that work is actually challenging us. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on here.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:16:32] Yeah. So we break it down in terms of the work context into both the pace of change and the type of change. And they're unprecedented. You know, we've never experienced anything like it before. It's become a platitude to say anything about the pace of change. Right. There's a very big difference between being able to intellectually recite the fact that there is a rapid pace of change around us, and to internalize that to the point that you are planning your life to account for that. You're planning your own developmental path to be prepared for that. You hear so often people saying, oh, it's just one thing after another. Like, when am I going to get a break? And it's real and it's true and we all feel it, but we're not going to get a break. That's the reality that we have to accept and we have to plan for and be ready for. Now, that doesn't mean we can't take a break, and we shouldn't step back and do what we need to do for our own self-care. But even that act, it's not a one and done that's restoration. We need to figure out how to do continuously over the course of our career is the changes are going to keep coming, and they're going to keep coming faster than they even are today. So the pace of change is one. And then the nature of change, which is highly uncertain, complex. You know, the acronym Vuca is a great descriptor for this. It's very hard to see where it's coming from, and it's very hard to see what are all of the ways that it's going to unfold and affect us, for better and for worse. And so it challenges our ability or desire to kind of see ahead, which we call prospection. And that's one of the areas of one of the five skills that we recommend investing in developing in order to help us restore a sense of agency in this era, and to return to a feeling, a greater feeling of empowerment at a time where we are constantly at risk of feeling victimized by everything happening around us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:32] Yeah. So you use the the acronym Vuca, which is shorthand that it's the letters Vuca for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. My understanding is that that term actually originally I believe came out in military and now has been used a lot to describe the world of work and the world of trying to, like, survive life and organization and a corporation, because it's the air that breathes so many companies. And like we were saying, this is not a new experience. It's been there for a long time and it's been getting worse. You you call out the pace of change, which often just exacerbates this. Um, I wonder whether the last couple of years have really brought this to the surface so much, because the stakes feel like they became life or death. And they literally did become life or death for many people. And they also became, you know, in the blink of an eye, my entire career could vanish. And we had to face sort of like the compression of what had been happening for a couple of decades in a really short period of time.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:19:43] Yeah, I think that's that's exactly right. And, you know, the question is, is it going to, quote unquote, go back to normal or is this the new normal? And I think more likely than not, this is the new normal. The pace is not going to slow down anytime soon. And how do we live with a world that has new strains of Covid every winter and adjust to that? And in the meantime, there's, you know, a third black swan that comes out of nowhere. And, you know, it's it's the the global nature of our economy and the rapid pace of of technologies development and In abolition. It makes these things hit us so fast all at once. It's not like it's contained to one part of the world that has a chance to adjust, and the rest of us have a chance to prepare. It's, you know, it's out of Wuhan before we even know it existed.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:35] And now we're all dealing with the reality of the fact that this probably is the new normal or abnormal. It's like abnormal is normal. Like now. Like there is no going back. I think we've all kind of come to that place and sort of like if this is the future, if this pace and this level of disruption is just the way things are, what do we do with that? You know, and I think that's a lot of what you're talking about here almost, and using the context of work as this container that says, like, we can do everything in the name of improving this experience, and it's also going to have this astonishing ripple effect back into just how you live as a human being.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:21:15] 100%. And as we try to make really clear in the book, if we do this correctly, it has a payoff. Obviously, for ourselves, our careers, that means it's better for our organizations. And so that's where organizations can become allies in investing, in helping us build these skills. And, you know, in the tools that will help us to do that because it's in our mutual interest. And that's been one of the best parts for me of partnering with large organizations to develop these tools over time is realizing that if we can align the incentives and we can, as long as we scope things correctly and are very clear about what we're trying to accomplish at any given moment, innovation can happen so much more rapidly and we can dramatically increase access to critical services by way of the employer umbrella.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:07] Yeah.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:22:11] That employees are no longer looking for compensation as the be all and end all, you know, certainly career advancement. But really it's much more about growth than any particular linear path. We want and need to feel like we are developing as humans, as professionals. That can mean a lot of things. If we don't have a path for that at our employer, it's going to be very easy for us to jump ship. Meaning and purpose. We are expecting to have a sense of alignment of values with our employer. It doesn't necessarily have to be a mission driven company, but the way that business gets done, the way that we treat each other, the way we treat our customers, we need to feel values aligned to feel good about getting up and going to work every day. And there's a lot of options for people who don't feel that way. You know, there's a lot of opportunities to do short term work to bridge gaps between employers. It doesn't mean it's easy or inconsequential to move from one place to another, but it's a much more fluid labor market than ever before. And we know ten years are just naturally so short these days that it's harder than ever to retain someone, especially a really high potential, high talent individual who's going to have lots of opportunities. Those are the folks you're going to want to retain, and those are going to be the ones who have the most at their fingertips in terms of what the market is offering them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:36] Yeah. So let's go a little bit deeper into meaning, because it's one of these five sort of signposts or psychological superpowers or things to focus on where where you sort of say, you know, to really prepare yourself to thrive and to tap business and the workplace and, you know, like your job, your career as an engine to not just rewire how organizations function and let them thrive, but help individuals thrive. There are these five key things that we need to focus on, and meaning is one of them. And it's interesting to me because, you know, we're having this conversation, you know, Studs Terkel, right, comes out with working, I think in the mid 70s, 74 or something like that. Like it says, clear as day. You know, it's not just about daily bread, it's about daily meaning. This is not a new thing, you know, an existential crisis, the classic midlife crisis. It's not a crisis of money, status, power or stuff. It's a crisis of meaning. Why are we still here?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:24:34] Yeah. As in, why is this? Why haven't we figured this out yet? Yeah, that's the question. Yeah. No. And I think it's really important to recognize that it's not as if we never wanted meaning from our jobs before. I think that what we're seeing more and more today is some more explicit part of what employees are coming to the table looking for, and it's a more explicit part of the way employers are evaluating employees is are they aligned to our mission, our values, much more than do they have the hard skills we need on paper to get us there? One of the challenges of meaning a purpose is something that I and Better App Labs have been studying for a long time now. What does it mean to have meaning and purpose? How do we find it? What are the dimensions of it? One of the questions I get all the time from large organizations is, is it even possible to make someone's job more meaningful for them? Isn't that something that happens in the interior? And also for some people, it's so close to spirituality that it feels a little funny to think about, quote unquote, interfering in that part of their life. And so for that reason, Marty and I prefer the term mattering. And that's something we talk a lot about in the book. And so think of mattering as the part of meaning that's actionable, that's highly concrete.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:25:57] Rebecca Goldstein says that our need to matter is one of the reasons that we think of that as the reason for our existence. Right. You need to feel like me being on this podcast matters. You know? I need to feel like me. Cooking dinner for my kids matters. It's such a difficult thing in today's world of work where we work on something for six months, suddenly the market changes. We have to put it aside and work on something completely new. So often we're walking away from large bodies of work that just we never got to act on because things change too quickly. And it is also something where the manager is essential to create that sense of mattering for the individual. And I think that it's a very fair and appropriate. We can agree that an individual has the right to feel from their supervisor that their work matters to them, and to help them understand why their work matters to be done at all. Otherwise, we may as well be monkeys on a typewriter trying to, you know, create Shakespeare. So that is a skill, ultimately, that managers actually need to get really good at is helping to help the individual understand, why are you doing this? Why is it important for the organization? Why is it important for your colleagues and these other teams around you? And if you do have to stop, and you may in fact have to stop on a dime to be able to tell you why we're stopping, what good is still going to have come out of the work that you did, whether it's your own development, whether it's pieces of that work we can come back to, why does that work still matter, even though we need to change tack so quickly? That's one of the skills that we think modern managers need to get really, really good at.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:27:37] It's not something anyone's teaching them right now. It's also not something all managers have an appetite for. And so part of what needs to happen around management today is the role that managers changed dramatically. It needs to be made clear. What does it mean to take on the role of leading a team? What does it mean to take on having people report to you? You're not pushing paper. You're not telling people, here's your job then. Then you do this next. It's really a much more holistic role and you have a huge impact on that individual's wellbeing. And if that's not something that you feel motivated by or inspired by, there's got to be other ways to grow your career than to manage people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:19] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And the realization that in today's workforce, it is such a common experience to, you know, like to be working on something as a team. And, and then the economy changes, the internal priorities change, the resources change. You lose a client, whatever it may be, and you wake up then and you show up, you know, at work the next day and it's like, oh, that's over. And now we're going to be going in this direction. And like the point you make about people in any kind of leadership position, understanding the importance of having a conversation around that moment rather than just saying, okay, this is done, here's the new thing is so important. And just from a navigating or from trying to tell the story of like the continuity of mattering across things that are perpetually changing, which also might not be an easy or even a true story to tell. You know, no matter how skilled the manager may be at trying to figure out, like at understanding how important it is to be able to share that narrative. But I wonder if the reality on the ground in organizations is a lot of times it really didn't matter, and there is going to be no continuity of that effort. I mean, you've been so much deeper into that than I have. What's your take on that?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:29:38] If we don't feel that our efforts are going toward some productive outlet, we're not going to want to keep doing the work right. If we have the opportunity to move to a different place, we will. It creates a retention risk. And I think that lots of times in very good faith, we take something on, and then there is this dramatic shift away from it. And it's hard to say, okay, I was building product A, but now we're going to market with product B, product is on the shelf. Y is product a matter? I still think that there are ways that that work matters to any organization. And if it doesn't, there may be a lack of integration across the organization. So for example, even just through the lens of an individual employees development, when they're working on product A, they should have been growing in some way. And their skills and their abilities to communicate, to navigate ambiguity, complexity, whatever it would be. You know, each task you take on should be an opportunity for growth. Ideally, a manager is able to recognize that, witness it, honor it, say, you know, we had to put that product on the shelf, but you picked up this skill that's now going to let you take on this other thing.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:30:53] I've been working in product for many years now. It's very, very common that the products on the shelf get recycled in various ways. Ideas get brought back in, you know, even if you don't know for sure that that's going to happen, you can say in good faith that that's likely. If you're working in an organization where ideas are shared, even if it gets referenced as a point of learning for the organization, there's still a sense of mattering there. If we don't feel that we risk being demotivated, it becomes also creates much greater risk of burnout for us to not have that essential. Why fueling effort after effort. You also need to have a sense of trust and good faith from your manager to kind of buy into those stories. But really, we're looking for recognition. We're looking to feel that someone saw that we worked hard, someone saw that we did high quality work, even if it doesn't get out to the market, because something changed. In the macro climate, that's meaningful to feel seen and recognized, and it helps with our sense of achievement.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:55] Yeah. It's interesting you made a really, I think, nuanced but important distinction between you can get this feeling of, okay, so this the six months I just devoted to this really mattered. I think on the surface, you could say, well, like the project that I was working on or the product I was working on, like that thing, I believed in it. And that's why it mattered to me. And you could anchor like that sense around that. But if there isn't also like the broader understanding of saying, well and like, yes. And, you know, it was also an incredible experience for you to grow and learn new skills and context and, and solve really cool, interesting new problems and learn a whole different methodology of how to solve problems and learn how to work better with like, other people. And if that's not, I feel like it's a harder, it's harder for a manager or a leader to tell that story at the end of the cycle, rather than to understand that that's something that needs to be communicated on an ongoing basis. And then if something ends, it's much easier to say, okay, so I get it. And it's a bit of a bummer. But, you know, I've understood all along there's just a whole bunch of other things that are making me feel like, like, this matters and I matter totally.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:33:08] And I think that's also part of why opportunities for growth have become such an important part of what employees are looking for and what organizations need to to provide, because they cannot guarantee that, you know, your sales region is going to stay your sales region for your tenure, but they should be able to guarantee you that you will continue to opportunities to grow as a salesperson. Whatever region you're in, whatever customers you're working with, whatever product you're selling, you know, it may not be every single day there's some dramatic growth opportunity, but on the whole, that's the orientation. And that becomes its own very deep and important and sustaining source of mattering. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:48] No, that makes so much sense to me. One of the other of those five factors that you talk about is you describe as rapid rapport. And it kind of relates back to something that you shared earlier in the conversation, which is the importance of people. The importance of relationships and feeling connected. It's interesting the way that you tee this up, though, as it's not about just the importance of people in connection. There's like the notion of rapid rapport, what's going on here that makes rapid rapport critically important.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:34:20] On the one hand, we need each other as much as we ever have. We need each other to feel whole, to feel well, to feel like our authentic selves. We also need each other at work. The work that needs to be done requires innovation across lots of contributors. Requires global collaboration. There are very few forms of work you can be good at today without effective collaboration. And yet, there are significant barriers to connection defined by our world of work. So the first that we offer is time. We have feel anyway, like we have less and less time for each other. We're busier and busier. All these people sit at their desks to eat lunch by themselves. The second factor after time is space. So we feel this sense of divide because we're geographically divided, we're working remotely. We are asynchronously slacking with each other instead of talking to each other live. And then the third barrier is what we call ask them. It's the language of Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, but it's the way that our brain divides between people who are in us and people who are in them, and that happens across so many dimensions that we're not even aware of.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:35:36] Obviously, things like race and ethnicity, but also things like what function you're a part of. Are you on marketing or are you on sales? That's an ask them distinction by company. Are you in our rival company? Are you in and our company, geography, culture, language, so many dimensions of difference. And as opposed to the way the context in which we evolved, where everyone close to us was in us, more or less or constantly around people, that our brain is registering as a them. And in order to connect, we need to overcome these three barriers. And we call it rapid rapport because time is in so many ways the defining feature, we need to quickly overcome these. We're forming new teams. The teams disband three months later, reconstitute across continents and functions, etc. but our teams and our work cannot be optimal if we're not connected and we don't have some baseline of trust. So how do you quickly establish that trust, despite the fact that we're limited in time, despite the fact that you're divided in space and despite the fact that we're processing most of the people we work with automatically as a then rather than an us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:46] That's the big question, right? It's interesting you're teeing this up in the context of teams and organizations. But this is also a problem of life. Yes.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:36:56] It's great and it's absolutely true outside of work as well. I think you know what work spins up even more intensely is first, the geographic piece and then the piece of just changing teams all the time, like at least outside of work, after a few months, you can come back to a friendship and keep coming back to the friendship. Sometimes at work, you need to get to that place of trust and be working with a team you just met on some high priority initiative that's due, you know, the the milestones are due in three days. So getting to that place where you can trust each other to get to the output that comes out of high, trusting, collaborative relationships is part of what we're trying to help people with.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:39] What the big question, of course, you know, like how yeah. What are some of the big mechanisms that you've seen be really effective with this.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:37:47] Yeah. So I'll start with time and then we can see if we want to continue through the other barriers. So time we feel short on time all the time. We're always trying to multitask and kind of delude ourselves into thinking we can get more out of the moments. We offered two strategies on time. The first is there's a really fascinating study done by a brilliant group of psychologists called Giving Time Gives You Time. What they did was they looked at a group of people, all of whom had a sense of time pressure. They basically gave them time back in their day, and they told them that this time that was back in their day. They could use it in any one of four ways. One was do nothing, do something for yourself. One was do something kind for others. And I forget now what the fourth one was. But of all of the conditions they tested, the only one that actually made people feel like they had more time in their day was doing something for others. And so the lesson here is that the more starved we feel for time, the more we can benefit from giving even a small amount of that time to others. It will give us a sense of time abundance instead of time famine to do kind acts for others. So think of something small that you can do. Do it, and then savor and enjoy the sense of time abundance that results. You need to process that cognitively to really then help yourself unlearn this habit of, I just don't have time to do something nice for someone or to, you know, be connected to someone.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:39:15] The other piece around time that's fascinating is we really overestimate how long it takes to have a meaningful connection with someone. And this has been studied best back in the world of medicine. So doctors are arguably among the professionals who are most starved for time. They have 15 minutes that they're reimbursed for for each patient. Some of those patient interactions are extremely intense. They're giving bad news. How do you do that in that time constraints. And so these studies have been done around what do doctors need to say? How long does it actually take to establish connection and alleviate anxiety for the patient. And also, by the way, get to a better medical outcome long term. And so dozens of studies have looked at this. And it's less than a minute. It's less than a minute of the what you have to say words of compassion, words of kindness, words of care to help that person feel connected to you and to help get to a better outcome. So just think of that for yourself and your team. Think about taking 45 seconds even at the end of a meeting. Words of encouragement, words of connection, word together. It takes so little time. It will give you a longer sense of time in your day, that sense of time abundance and it will meaningfully connect you to that individual, even if it seems hard to believe. So we try to go through a lot of that data in detail to help reframe this idea of what it actually takes to get there.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:45] It's so interesting that you bring medicine into it, too, because you think about, yeah, like talk about rapid fire. You need to actually develop rapport really quickly, especially because some of those conversations are not going to be easy or necessarily happy ones for the patient. And somehow you've got to have it.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:41:02] And I think it also to go back to that part of our conversation, one of the biggest challenges is that these incentive structures in medicine are in many ways dehumanizing the interactions between patients and providers. And, you know, how do we how do we fix that problem? I think is one of the crises in in healthcare today. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:23] And one that I don't think there's an easy solution to. But I think on the one hand it's really complicated. On the other hand, it's really simple. Yeah. But like yeah, it's an interesting moment, I think for medicine in particular around these ideas. One thing I do want to talk about is something you referenced earlier. Also, because I feel like it's kind of the centerpiece to a certain extent. And tell me if I actually got this right in sort of like the five really important things to focus on. And it's this word you used earlier, which is prospection, which is fascinating for me because I'm somebody who, if I understand it correctly, this is effectively sort of like really being able to spend time looking forward and thinking about and pondering and anticipating what might be coming, what it might look like, how I, as an individual might respond to that or prepare myself for it, or literally bring it into reality or larger scale as an organization, how we might respond to it. I'm somebody who has been literally, pathologically prospective as a human being, to the point where I have uttered the phrase so many times in my life, I was like a decade too early and not in a good way. You know, it's like, ah, if only I had sort of like, like sat on this idea for a decade. Like it wasn't time. Like the time wasn't right. And then you have, you know, in the literature, um, you know, one of the earliest books in the happiness movement, Dan Gilbert, comes out with stumbling on happiness. And a lot of the book is about this thing he called affective forecasting, and he's saying how utterly awful we are as human beings at trying to, like, see what's coming and accurately predict them, even, like just in our own individual lives, and understand how we might feel if something happened. So talk to me more about Prospection. Why is this so important? And. Yeah. Are we good at it or not?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:43:12] Yeah. So Prospection is imagining and planning for the future. And are we good at it or not? Depends on who you're comparing us to. Or the only species that can really do it. Um, you know, at the, at the level that we're talking about. So in that sense, we're really good at it. Our world is very challenging to prospect about for all the reasons we talked about. It's it's a Vuca world. One of the definitions is it's volatile. It's uncertain. All of that amounts to unpredictability. We know that you can get better at prospection. And actually, you know, one of the data sets we use most often is our coaching data set. Look at hundreds of thousands of people who've gone through coaching. What are they grow at? How over what time frame? Prospection is the thing that they grow at most quickly, most consistently. It's pretty dramatic.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:00] Oh, interesting.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:44:01] And so one of the myths we're trying to break down is that you can actually grow better at Prospection. Part of it requires understanding. What does prospection look like in the brain? Where does it happen? How does it happen, and how can we get more precise in addressing the parts of our own prospection that are working really well versus the ones where we have areas of opportunity? So for example, we break down prospection happens in two phases. So you're thinking about the future, thinking about what's my next job opportunity. The first phase is going to be really fast, really optimistic, excited. Divergent. And then after a few seconds to minutes, depending on who you are, suddenly the reality hits. And it's much more evaluative and deliberate and a bit more pessimistic. Both of those phases are really important for effective prospection some people need help in the first phase, some people need help in the second phase. The kinds of help we need in each phase are different. And so there's lots of ways to improve at that. What you started with, by the way, around being ahead of your time that I would categorize as a problem of distal innovation. So I.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:14] Get that.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:45:14] I think that's yeah, that's um, certainly, you know, innovation of that kind is a kind of prospection. And I think there's different strategies for how to, how to bridge from here to there so you don't miss that market opportunity.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:28] It's interesting because you also when you describe this, relate the two phase model of prospection how you can literally like figure out, like where do I need a bit of help? Where do I need skills? And kind of like focus in and train those two phases. You also use the word when you're talking about phase one, divergent. When I first read you describing the two phase model, I'm like, this sounds a whole lot like one of the central models of creativity around divergent and convergent thinking. And then there's this overlap with Kahneman's system one and system two, which, you know, you talk about more when you when you talk about creativity and innovation and like salience and executive control was like all of these things overlap in really interesting ways. And it's sort of like these are all the places where the brain plays. You're not responding to current data. You know, you're responding to what could be.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:46:15] Yeah, yeah, I love that. It's a beautiful way to put it. And I find the confluence of all of those models to be exciting and reassuring. And, you know, to me, it's pointing toward truth. And we haven't quite gotten there. We have a lot of different slices at it. But, you know, we're all convalescing on the same idea. And I think it's also getting at something that has become more taboo to talk about in psychology over the last like 70 years or so, but a lot of creativity. There's all this evidence around non-conscious parts of creativity, and there's a sort of romantic idea that creativity comes from the quote unquote unconscious, which is not something you're allowed to say as a psychologist anymore. But as an artist, you can say it. And yet, we also have all of this great neuroscience data on the default mode network, which is sort of our daydreaming network. And and that is not fully under conscious control. And so how do we optimize for a process that requires non-conscious contributions is part of what I find so fascinating about creativity. And as you know, in the book, we try to take some notes from the way that those who train people on sleep have approached the same kind of a challenge, which is to say, what are behavioral modifications you can do to set yourself up for the outcome of interest in this case, in their case sleep, in our case, creativity. How can you organize your life and your lifestyle to position you better for the creative output you're seeking?

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:51] Yeah, the overlap there is really interesting too, and it ties into the idea of how we experience time. And time seems to be like the acceleration of the cycles, and time just weaves through everything that we're talking about. And whether it's prospection or like accessing creativity and being innovative, you know, and you just brought it up like so much of of insight based ideation. It doesn't come from analytical process. It comes when you actually work at it and then create the time to step away from it and just let your brain do what it needs to do. And it's like you're walking down, like all the classic things like in the shower or going for a walk. They've sustained for a reason. Yeah. You know, and when we make our lives so brittle from a time perspective, it's like I often wonder, what are we taking from an ideation and creativity and innovation and contribution level when we do that? And like, what are we taking from our own lives, from the joy of being creative? But what are we taking from society and from the world in terms of like what could be had we actually slowed down a little bit rather than sped up?

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman: [00:49:02] Totally, totally. And our devices are not helping us in this regard.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:07] Indeed. Um, two other things you talk about in the book are resilience. And we've kind of wandered our way into creativity and innovation. Also. There's so much more and so much more. How to within also definitely encourage everybody to check it out. I will be moving through it and rereading a few times, but so enjoy just learning more. And I love I love how you're sort of taking the full sweep of your experience as somebody who cares about the human experience and really sort of like opening up, expanding and saying, what's the mechanism like? What are the on ramps available to change the human condition that would be most compelling for both people and massive organizations with incredible resources and ulterior motives to get behind all of these really big, powerful ideas that might actually make us live better lives and actually walk through the day with more joy. Um, and I am a huge fan of pulling any levers that we can to do that. So super excited to just keep deepening into your work. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life. Take the time to discover your own personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. Special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED.