Ceilings, Frames, & Churn: Breaking Invisible Barriers in Your Work and Relationships

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

For nine years, nobody could break the four minute mile. Actually for all of human history. But it had been nine years that humanity had been so close. It wasn't for a lack of trying. The world's best middle distance runners had been circling it for a decade, chipping away, coming close, but always stopped by the same ceiling. The record stood at 4 minutes and 1.4 seconds. And the sports medicine consensus was fairly grim. The human body probably couldn't go faster.

Todd Henry [00:00:32]:

Some said attempting it might actually kill you. Then on May 6, 1954, a 25 year old medical student named Roger Bannister ran 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds at a modest track in Oxford, England. He was training during his lunch breaks. He wasn't even a full time athlete. And here's what I want you to notice. 46 days later, John Landy broke Bannister's record. Then, within three years, 16 runners had done what the experts said the human body couldn't do. Same bodies, same distance, nine years of failure and then a cascade.

Todd Henry [00:01:09]:

What changed wasn't the physiology. What changed was the frame. Once Bannister proved it was possible, other runners stopped organizing their effort around an impossible ceiling and started running toward a door that they could now see was open. The barrier was never in their legs. It was in their heads and in the heads of everyone around them who kept telling them they'd hit a wall. We just saw the same thing happen with the two hour marathon. Just last weekend we had two runners break the two hour marathon wall. This was something that seemed impossible only a few weeks ago, and now it seems likely to happen more and more often.

Todd Henry [00:01:47]:

I think about these stories sometimes when I think about the work that we do as creative professionals and the work that we don't do because most of us are running against ceilings that we didn't personally install ceilings. About what kind of work we're capable of, about what purpose is supposed to look like in practice, about whether we're even the kind of person who does meaningful things or whether that's for somebody else. Those frames are invisible. They're often inherited from family, from the narrow slice of careers we happen to see growing up, from the people around us who meant us well when they told us what the limits were. And those limits, those frames are quietly shaping every lap we run. Today we have two guests who are each, in different ways, in the business of showing you where the door is. Tom Rath is a best selling author and one of the sharpest thinkers I know about meaningful work. He has a new book called what's the Point? It's a field guide for escaping the default life.

Todd Henry [00:02:51]:

And it starts by dismantling some things that we've believed about ourselves that were never really true. And then we have Dr. Claude Steele. He's a Stanford social psychologist behind Whistling Vivaldi. And he returns with a new book called Churn, a book that names the hidden cognitive cost of navigating difference and. And what it takes to move from defensiveness to genuine connection. They're both discussing different problems with, in some ways, the same route, a frame that's narrower than it needs to be. This is Daily Creative.

Todd Henry [00:03:26]:

Since 2005, we served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the.

Tom Rath [00:03:38]:

I stumbled into the book's title. We started off trying to write a book about careers and purpose.

Todd Henry [00:03:43]:

That's Tom Rath talking about the title of his new book, what's the Point?

Tom Rath [00:03:47]:

And I realized in the middle of that, while we're editing phases, that when most of us hear the word purpose, it gives us anxiety. And it seems like something too big and too large of a goal and kind of something that comes along and people are really lucky to find one day. But as I got into the research, I realized that purpose can and should be one of the most practical things that we do in a given day. And we have to build it into the routine of our work. And so as we started looking at what are ways to get people thinking in the right orientation on a given day, we changed course and said, no, People just need to learn to build into their routine. Every morning when they wake up, you say, what's the point? Why am I doing this? Does it serve a purpose? Does it serve another person? And if not, can you stop doing it? Can you rearrange your schedule change? Should you think about doing something else? Because it is so darn easy to just sleepwalk through a given day. So we realized that we needed kind of an orienting question. What's the point for all of us to just step back and say, why am I doing this first today? And so as I've worked on this book, and it's really helped me to restructure my own days, which I can rarely say for some of these books, where I'm doing more purposeful work earlier on in the day and getting a lot more done, Because I'm asking why more frequently.

Todd Henry [00:05:01]:

Essentially, I think we often take existence for granted. We take it as a given. And as a result, I think we exist our way through our Day we don't really, we never really live. We're just existing through our day. We get through the work. We're not really engaging with the work in a way that's meaningful or purposeful. And one of the ways that you talk about the sort of reorientation of how we approach our days is to move from a really from a what do I do to who do I help mindset. Right.

Todd Henry [00:05:31]:

So from a self oriented question to an others oriented question. Why is that so important for us if we want to discover what's the point?

Tom Rath [00:05:40]:

I think to some degree we've all got to figure out a way to get out of our own heads in order to be of service. And I mean for the sake of our overall well being as well. The people I know who focus more on themselves and trying to pound themselves into the world versus asking what other people need or asking what their community needs or what the organization needs or what the world needs. When you start with that orientation, it alleviates a lot of the, as you described, self orientation where you're caught up in thinking everyone really cares about what's going on with you and you're worried about making sure that you find the right career for you instead of saying how can I look at things that my community needs? And essentially when I look at this from a macro standpoint, I feel like we've done a pretty good job. And you and I have written books on this and talked about it a lot where helping people to know more about themselves and be more of who they are. And that is an important part of the process. But it's like half of it at most. The other big piece is the demand side.

Tom Rath [00:06:38]:

So there's a supply of who you are, but then there's a demand of what our world needs. And it's almost better off to start with the demand side and then work back from who you are with the supply side of it. And I think that's one piece of it. The other piece is you've written about is there's even more impetus for everyone to take some proactive time in their day and actually create things that can be a work of art, it can be a product, it can be a service that do something for people on a day to day basis. Because the pure responsive stuff that so many of us get caught up in our days, I don't most of that's just going to get automated away anyhow.

Todd Henry [00:07:14]:

I think that's a really important point. I think some of us who maybe who are listening, who maybe find Some sense of purpose or meaning or identity is probably a better way to say it in what we produce every day. Some of that is going to be taken away from us over the next couple of years. So we, we aren't going to be able to point to something and say, without me, that would not have been, because we're going to have these alien brains that are creating things for us. Which I think makes that question about who am I serving or who am I doing this for, who do I help? So much more important. Because then it's less about, hey, look at me and look at the work I'm doing, and it's more about, hey, look at the outcome, look at the improvement that I'm making, look at the contribution I'm making. And I think if we can find even. And this is something Even in my 50s, Tom, and your book helped me think about this in a new way, because I think Even in my 50s, I'm discovering I always want to do something big.

Todd Henry [00:08:07]:

If it's, if it doesn't scale, I'm not interested. Right? And so I'm always looking at, oh, how can I go start something, or how can I build a movement, or how can I create large, some sort of communication that's gonna reach a lot of people? And I've come to learn in my 50s, what I need to do is just go find a person and just help a person and just see what I learned from that and see how it benefits them and then pivot and maybe help another person. And then pretty soon I'm helping several people. And then, oh, all of a sudden I've got a little community of people that I'm helping. But I think for some of us, I think we start with the how do I want to be seen? How do I want to be known? Instead of who do I want to help? And I think that that's why this question is so valuable.

Tom Rath [00:08:45]:

Well, and a lot of my, Some of my things was really influenced by this and started with your book Die Empty where? And now, since then, I. Since I read that, I've moved into a house here. It's right across the street from a cemetery. So I kind of walk through and really think about what's the point at the end, what's the point going to be? And the point's going to be those in depth relationships you just talked about. And it's relationships you have with one of your kids. It's relations with a spouse, a friend, someone like my business partner I've worked with for 30 years. We can talk for 15 seconds and get something done that takes other people 10 hours. Right.

Tom Rath [00:09:14]:

So those long term relationships, that is what I hope people remember and has a bigger influence than any of the books or products or stuff I've worked on. And then that's just an added thing that if those scale and reach more people, that's great too, I think. And you and I had talked about this before, but when I was working on one of the last chapters in this what's the Point book, there's a chapter about challenging people to do more creating and producing instead of just sitting back and responding where they've got to pull the balance of initiating it. And when I was working on, I almost cut that out because I was worried that some people don't feel like it's their job to be creating and putting new things together and all that. But the more I try to get into the psychology myself of how the world's changing, I'm not sure that saying I'm not creating something that continues to have impact when I'm not working on it, I don't know that's going to be very sustainable in the future. So I think almost anyone should challenge themselves to say, how can you invest in something with hours every single day that are putting something into the world that grows in your absence, even if that's through the context of a few relationships. Right.

Todd Henry [00:10:25]:

That sort of almost an entrepreneurial mindset around contribution as opposed to a solo practitioner or a freelancer mindset. Seth Godin talks about the difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur. And he said a lot of people think they're entrepreneurs, but they're not because if they stop working, their, their business goes away. But an entrepreneur is someone who's building systems that will continue to have impact. And I love that way of thinking about it. How can we continue to have a contribution? Even if we stop putting direct effort into it, the contribution is going to be there. And you talk about this in terms of planting, planting gardens that are going to be around long after we're gone. Really in some ways that's, that's a good mindset, right? It's a good way to think about it.

Todd Henry [00:11:02]:

What seeds am I planting? How am I investing in something? I may never see the benefit.

Tom Rath [00:11:06]:

And if you, if you have that, if you think about that orientation and then you take it all the way down from end of life and say, how does that change what I should prioritize in the next three hours of my workday, that really works. I've been Surprised by how well that's translated in my routine of saying I'm going to put off some of the things of watching stock tickers was one of my bad addictions that I did throughout the day, or having CNBC on in the background, or answering email, or all these things that I didn't realize the degree to which they'd invaded my day in the moment. And if I can put that stuff off and not worry about it until at the end of the day or weekend or whatever, I just. I'm getting more done than I've been able to in five, 10 years and having more fun at it because it's. I'm prioritizing the meaningful stuff essentially. More. I've been able to make this purpose thing practical, more enjoyable things have been.

Todd Henry [00:11:55]:

One of the things I love about your writing, Tom, is that you take common beliefs or maybe things like tropes that we've heard, and you. You incinerate them, which I think is great. I think it's. You have a real knack for that, for identifying those. You talk about childhood dreams and you describe them as anchors rather than wings. Right. But I. You often hear things like, oh, what did you want to be when you were a child? That's the purest form of ambition, and that's probably what you should be doing.

Todd Henry [00:12:20]:

And you're saying, okay, we should rethink that. Why is that the case? Because I do think that's a common belief, right, that the purest form of who you are and your work in the world is whatever you wanted to be when you were a child. So tell us why we're believing a myth when we believe that.

Tom Rath [00:12:35]:

Yeah, there's a little story on that. So I grew up believing those myths, too. And I entered the workforce and was in my job, and I'd already written some books and. Or my first book, at least. And I wanted to believe that all this was my own original desires and work and all that kind of stuff. And then I. When I was probably 25, I wasn't married to my wife yet. I went.

Tom Rath [00:12:56]:

She took me to a wedding down in South Carolina. And at a real nice hotel, I meet a bunch of people I didn't know. And they're my agent. They said. The first question everyone asked is, they said, what's your daddy do? And I went to my wife and I said, why are they asking me what my dad does? He, like, is in Singapore and whatever. And she said, that's because they all just assume that's what you're going to do. And I was like, oh crap. And then I started to get into some of the research on this and especially if you look like it's studies out of Europe where they track people longitudinally from the 1970s to 2000, pretty much that's what happens to most of us.

Tom Rath [00:13:32]:

We end up following in the boys fall in the dad's footsteps, the girls fall in the mom's footsteps. And in some cases we put this in a table in the book, you're 150 or 300 times more likely to end up in the exact same profession if your mom's a military officer or your dad's a dentist or a shoemaker or whatever one is, most of the things we end up doing and it's not our fault. We'll have exposure to two or three things when we're growing up and we probably need exposure. We would need exposure to 50 just to see 50% of the most common jobs in the US workforce. So we're looking out of a pinhole when we enter the workforce and aperture of that lens is maybe 2 or 3%. And so of course we're going to fall into the default. And then sometimes if we don't follow what mom did or dad did, or an aunt or uncle or someone who we were lucky enough to see, then we fall into what society and financial expectations are there. So you say I'm going to med school, law school, business school, whatever it might be.

Tom Rath [00:14:27]:

I saw a lot of that when I was in college. But it's really the edge case of one or two in a hundred people who really are deliberate about seeing a lot of things and they end up there because they've really scrutinized it. So for me personally, when I realized that and I grew up in a little family business and my parents and grandparents were entrepreneurs and researchers. So sure enough, that's exactly what I was doing when I took a tough look at this. And I still haven't gotten out of my comfort zone enough. So I, I think when you realize that some of those dreams were either the default or they were your parents dreams that they encourage you to think about and follow. Just look at kids sports and that's just like latent failures of parents half the time, right? And then even if you did have a few dreams and get into something, you probably hadn't looked at the full array. To make a long story short here, the more I looked at this, I'm increasingly convinced that 80 to 90% of us get all the way to the headstone without ever uncovering what we could have been best at.

Tom Rath [00:15:25]:

So that's where a lot of my time and attention has been focused. So how can we help people to see 10 or 20% of what's out there instead of 4 or 5%?

Todd Henry [00:15:33]:

I think the phrase you use is the exposure gap. Is that the phrase you use in the book to discuss what are some ways we can open the aperture to be exposed to more so that we can understand the possibilities?

Tom Rath [00:15:44]:

Yeah, I think just helping people, especially early on in their career, to think about the importance of intellectual curiosity and seeing everything that's out there and maybe acknowledging what some of the influences have been on them so that they know that they need to try and expand their horizons as early as possible. Ideally before they've dedicated four years or six years of education to something, or before they've dedicated 15 or 30 years of a career to it. And then even when you're in the middle of your career, I would say to acknowledge that there's a pretty good chance that what you could do best is still sitting out there. I'm 50, I just turned 50. And when I really ask critical questions about this myself right now, I think it's a shame that I didn't see more doctors or people in medicine growing up because that might have been what I could have done best. Or maybe in finance, because I did a little bit of that and loved it when I was right out of college. And to just be open minded and curious. And then on a more tactical level, I've spent much of the last three to four years trying to put together real good Day in the Life videos for people to check out that we'll release pretty soon here so that you can see what's it like for a whole day in the life of being a nurse or being a pilot or being a therapist.

Tom Rath [00:16:58]:

I think to see a career as more of a meandering path where you're trying to get lost and venture off a little bit. Because once you acknowledge the fact that you have probably seen five, if you're lucky, 10% of what's out there from a professional standpoint, because none of us get to see half of what's out there before we get into college. I mean, maybe our job as parents or leaders or managers or what we do is our job is to stretch people's aperture out a little bit and help them to spot things that they don't see by nature because we're caught up in our own tunnel.

Todd Henry [00:17:33]:

Tom Rath's new book, what's the Point? Is available now wherever books are sold. So Tom used the word tunnel, the funnel that narrows from the moment we're teenagers, pointing us at a small slice of who we could become. And he also said something I want to sit with for a second, that the average person has only ever seen about 5% of the careers that actually exist. 5%. Which means that 95% of your possible future is terra incognita, and most of us never set foot in it. Tom's solution is to open the aperture, to expose ourselves to more things, which sounds wonderful, but there's also a psychological toll that we pay when we're in uncertain environments. And that's what we're going to talk about next. Dr.

Todd Henry [00:18:17]:

Claude Steele has spent decades studying a different kind of narrowing. He calls it churn, the mental and physical stress that kicks in when we're in situations with people who are different from us. It's not prejudice, exactly. It's the overhead. It's the cognitive load of asking constantly, how am I coming across? What's the right thing to say here? And it happens to all of us on all sides of every divide. This narrowing isn't about careers, it's about people and whether we're willing to actually pay the cost of really actually seeing someone who doesn't maybe look or live like us and what it gives back when we do. We'll be back with our conversation with Dr. Claude Steele and his book Churn in just a minute.

Todd Henry [00:19:01]:

Stick around.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:19:18]:

Yes. I have to sense, even though our times are famously divided and unrefutably, that people still have an appetite for wanting to be comfortable with our fellow Americans, despite our many differences, our huge array of identity differences. And so I wanted to rethink the question. I think we typically think of it as rooted somehow in our prejudices, and if we could just get away from those, we would have no problem. And I'm all for that theory, and I think our prejudices are important, but I do think there's something else involved. I had an intuition, and from both my research and from my experience as an administrator, there's something else involved. And churn is an attempt to capture what that is. And I think it is an attention that's inherent in diverse situations.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:20:06]:

What do I say? How do I say it? How do I behave here? How will someone of my identity be evaluated and treated in a situation like that? That is a set of questions that we churn over as we're. When. Especially when we're in a diverse situation, when we're in a more homogeneous situation there isn't so much identity diversity and we have the diversity that's dominant, then we never think about these things. We don't churn in the same way, but this kind of thought and apprehension and trying to figure it out that churn is arises in diverse situations and that that's something that's different than prejudice. It's not really rooted in prejudice. It happens to the prejudiced and non prejudiced alike. And I think it's a bigger barrier on one hand to, to our willingness to engage diverse situations and the issues involved there. But on the other hand I find a lot of reason for hope because I think it's fixable and I do think there are strategies that we can use as individuals and as institutions to make ourselves enable ourselves to be more comfortable with diversity and to even I dare say enjoy it eventually or in some ways that that's the thrust behind this book and churn is that particular form of apprehension about how I'm going to be seen or boy do I know how to behave here and so on that we can have when we're in diverse situations.

Todd Henry [00:21:34]:

I definitely want to talk about some strategies for us, especially as leaders to recognize and deal with these dynamics, but one of the, it's interesting because in the space, in the creative space, in the world of creative professionals, we often hear phrases like diversity is our strength. We need diversity of perspective, diversity of cultural experiences because that's going to allow us to be more resilient, more tenacious. But you describe in the book something that I had never come across is very interesting, that there are certain characteristics of churn and one of those is a mental bandwidth tax that we pay. And so while we say we want more diversity, we want more experiential diversity, cultural diversity on our teams in our conversations, there's also some overhead that comes with that plays out as churn. Could you talk about that mental bandwidth tax that you describe in the book?

Dr. Claude Steele [00:22:23]:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I think that what churn me refers to that in particular, that, that when we're in a diverse situation, all that thinking about how we can manage it, what's the appropriate thing to say, all of that is, is a cognitive load that is on top of the whatever cognitive load the demands of the situation are posing at the time. And so that that can. We're multitasking, we're trying to manage ourselves and this concern that we have and at the same time that we're trying to do the task that's right in front of us or the conversation that's right in front of us or the relationship that's right in front of us. And that can, that, that, that is the tax. I think it can seem burdensome. And so when we're, we can feel a great sense of relief when we're in a less diverse situation. I can just, I can go to an African American barbershop and feel, okay, it's. You don't feel the same churn.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:23:18]:

And so I wanted to capture that with a term like this, that and give it that identity.

Todd Henry [00:23:23]:

It's interesting because I have often I've encountered. And I've also even felt myself a little bit. It's strange, almost a sense of, of guilt sometimes for feeling out of place or guilt for feeling that, like you said, that cognitive load or that mental bandwidth strain. Is there something wrong with me that I'm experiencing this? And it was, it's actually in reading the book is very reaffirming to me that no, this is a normal thing that anybody experiences this when they're trying to communicate in a cross cultural way, whatever that that might look like. But also there are some very real effects of this on our cognitive abilities. You describe in the book the Stroop test. Could you share a little bit about what the findings were of that and how that impacts then our ability to engage in our work or to engage in any kind of mental activity that we might be engaged in?

Dr. Claude Steele [00:24:11]:

Yeah, I think that research you're referring to is. I won't go into the. Just describing the Stroop test that per se, maybe people would want to read the book to find encouragement there. But it's a measure of anxiety. And this research, really interesting research by Jennifer Richardson and Nicole Shelton at Princeton shows that people experience this interfering anxiety churn just by having college students interact together either in same ethnic racial pairs or in mixed racial ethnicity pairs. That in the mixed pairs, the stress is higher, the distraction is higher. People are trying to figure out how to behave appropriately on both sides of that situation. One of, one of the features of Churn that I also hope picks up is that everybody has it.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:25:00]:

It isn't a feature of one group or another group. It's a feature of coming together as different groups. That's what spurs it, triggers it and it's. And as you point out, it is a perfectly natural thing. All it is really is you're trying to figure out how to cope with the possibilities in a situation. And diverse settings have other some possibilities that you're worried about. I could make a mistake and Be seen in a way I wouldn't want to be seen. And I could do something that wouldn't go right or be interpreted the way I'd like it to be interpreted.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:25:32]:

So it's just a natural kind of apprehension about how to cope with the realities in a diverse situation. And the focus of the book has been, if that's the case, then that opens up a new road for remedy. And that road is rather than to focus so extensively on prejudice reduction, something I heartily endorse as a basic, I think, educational responsibility of a society like ours. But the new road is let's focus on building trust with each other. And we have a lot of experience with that in our lives, and we have good intuitions about how to do that. And we have done it. And many of us have across group relationships which can exemplify, give them examples of how that can be done and that it can be done, that people of very different backgrounds can become close friends, lifelong valiant friends. Or how does that happen? There's a trust built there.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:26:31]:

There's been some time, some effort, some recognition, maybe that trust is important in a situation like that. If I have another mission, it's that to just recognize how this basic aspect of human relations, how important it can be. We can forget that and just think in other terms. But what, when what really is going on is that once we trust each other, we stop churning.

Todd Henry [00:26:57]:

So just by way of bringing our conversation to a close, you talk about trust building being something. It's a game that's played on the ground that anyone can do it. What is a small daily habit that we can adopt to become an agent of trust in our organization or in our immediate circle.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:27:12]:

I do think I might point to that mindset idea that, you know, to work with, developing that habit of seeing difference as there's probably something there I don't really fully understand, understand. Maybe it would be interesting to get a better grasp of that and to pursue it that way. I think our human completely understandable reflex is in the face of difference, to get a little defensive of our own identity and to worry about protecting it in a situation where maybe it could be judged by negative stereotypes and the like. And so I'm not saying this mindset is just so easy, but I think as it becomes a stronger and stronger habit and as it becomes normative in a setting, a normative way of functioning in a setting, it can be really transformative. So I think a concrete step forward is to first recognize that mindset is there. The difference is an occasion to expand one's understanding. The travel shows often say the greatest cure for prejudice is to travel. To see a different world.

Dr. Claude Steele [00:28:17]:

Right in front of us are opportunities to see different worlds and to have as a habit of mind Recognizing that, I think can be a fun and interesting first step in the directions of building trust that the book is trying to argue for.

Todd Henry [00:28:34]:

Dr. Claude Steele's book Churn is available now wherever books are sold. So let's think back to Roger Bandister from For a second the runners who couldn't break four minutes for nine years didn't suddenly get new legs after May 6, 1954. They got a new frame. They stopped running against an impossible ceiling and started running toward an open door. And within three years, 16 other people had walked through that door. In many ways, both of today's conversations are about asking you to do the same thing. Find the frame, question it, and see what's on the other side.

Todd Henry [00:29:10]:

Tom Rath would tell you to start each morning asking, what's the point? Not as an existential crisis, but as a practical reorientation. Who am I serving today? What am I building that grows even when I stop pushing? The shift from what do I do? To who do I help? Is a frame shift. And he'd say it changes everything downstream. And Dr. Claude Steele would tell you to choose curiosity over defensiveness when you encounter difference. And you will, every day. Don't manage it. Explore it.

Todd Henry [00:29:39]:

The discomfort you feel in those moments isn't a wall. It's what a door feels like from the other side. Here's the challenge this week. Find one frame that you're operating from that you didn't consciously choose. It could be about your career, the ceiling that you accepted before you ever really tested it. It might be about a person or a group that you've decided in advance that you you just can't connect with. It might be about what kind of contribution you're actually capable of making. Name it, and then ask, what if it's wrong? What if I'm making an assumption that simply isn't true? Bannister's four minutes wasn't a wall.

Todd Henry [00:30:14]:

It was a story that someone told and everyone believed. And you've got a few of those too. So do I. So the question is whether you're willing to run at hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like all of our interviews in full, you can get them@dailycreativeplus.com that's where you can just enter your name and email address and we'll send you a private feed to listen to every interview in its entirety. My name is Todd Henry. If you'd like more information about my books and my speaking events, you can find it@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused, and brilliant.

Tom Rath [00:30:49]:

We'll see you then.