Growth Strategies Expert: Understanding Your Future Helps Reduce Anxiety

✅ Navigating the Seas of Uncertainty: Practical Tools for Maintaining Course in Unpredictable Times

🎧 In this enlightening episode of the Anxiety at Work podcast, join Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick as they delve into the complexities of anxiety in the workplace with Dr. Rita McGrath, a prominent figure in leading innovation during uncertain times.

Key Highlights: 📌
🔗 Embracing Uncertainty: Dr. McGrath discusses the inevitability of uncertainty in the workplace and how leaders can better prepare to face it head-on.
🧩 Taskers vs. Optimizers: Insights from Navy SEAL training reveal strategies on how to effectively approach tasks during high-pressure situations to reduce anxiety.
🔄 Prioritizing with Purpose: Learn how to manage your daily "truck" of tasks with Dr. McGrath's practical approach, ensuring the most critical jobs are tackled efficiently.
🗺️ Cultivating a Learning Culture: Dr. McGrath emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities, helping alleviate the pressure of perfectionism.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Anxiety at Work podcast. I'm Chester Elton and this is my co-author and dear friend, Adrian Gostick. Hi, everybody. We hope that the time you spend with us today is going to help remove the stigma of anxiety and mental health in the workplace and your personal life. We invite experts from around the world of work and life to give us ideas and most importantly tools to deal with anxiety in our world. You know in every life you need a guide and we we are so fortunate to have our sponsor Lifeguides. Lifeguides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom, and the support of a personal guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge of life and experience that you have. Your own personal guide, I love that, Adrian. Well, for our listeners, the offer for your team, for you, and to show that you care about your team, all you have to do is go to lifeguides.com forward slash schedule a demo and add the code healthy2021 in the free text box below and you get two months of free service. Everybody needs a guide. Make your guide a life guide. Well, we are delighted to welcome to the podcast a dear friend of ours. Our guest today is our good friend, Rita McGrath. Dr. McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought after speaker, long-time professor at Columbia Business School. She is widely recognized as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth through times of uncertainty. Rita has received the number one achievement award for strategy from Thinkers 50 and has been consistently named one of the world's top ten management thinkers. Rita is the author of the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage. Her new book is Seeing Around Corners. She received her PhD from the Wharton School. We are delighted to welcome to our podcast our good friend Rita McGrath. Welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, you two. I'm just thrilled to see your new book out in the world. Thank you. Hey, thanks, Rita. It's so great to have you on the show. We're really, as one of the world's experts on uncertainty, we found that, look, this is one of the most off-sided sources of anxiety we heard, too. As you said, we put our book out into the world. As I did my background on you, I know we've known you for a while, but I did a little bit of background. I know you started in strategy, but I think the cool kids have now migrated to innovation in all your world. You help organizations through uncertainty while they're continuing to innovate. Now, but to accomplish this, you say, we as leaders have to absorb as much uncertainty as possible. So help us understand that. Yeah, so what that means is, as a leader, you're organizationally and hierarchically better off than the people reporting to you to take on the burden of possibly being wrong, to take on the burden of possibly not having all the answers, because if you ask the people below you to take on that burden, they'll just freeze. They'll freeze in the headlights and you'll get back these totally dysfunctional responses. So let me give an example. I was working with a group in the insurance business launching a new product. And the important thing to know about insurance is it's regulated in the United States state by state. And so how big your geographic footprint can be when you launch is completely determined by how many state regulators have said green light, you can market in our state. And so I'm having this conversation that I'm observing between the project manager and the operations guy who's responsible for making this all happen. And the project manager is basically saying, are you ready? Are you ready? And the operations guy is, well, I'm not sure. I don't know. You know, I think, I think we're all right. And, you know, given and just waffling, like we're not getting anywhere. Like we're not getting a yes, we're not getting a no, we're getting no information whatsoever, which is what happens if you force people into high anxiety situations. So we kind of, my colleague and I kind of pulled the project manager aside and we said, look, you know, you're asking him an impossible question. And he said, why? I said, because the big uncertainty here is we don't know how many states. So you've got to put a stake in the ground, say what you think the number of states is and then ask him, is he ready? And so he said, all right, well, I'm not getting anywhere as it is, maybe I'll give it a try. So he goes back and he says to the head of operations, well, say I told you to be ready for 15 states, could you do that? And I was like, oh, absolutely, 15, we've even got a little spare capacity, I can move it. I mean, it was total clarity. Now, why I think that matters so much is not a single fact changed during that entire interchange. All that happened was the senior most person who was best able to bear the possible downside of something going wrong absorbed that uncertainty. He said, assume 15. So let's say it was 25 and the guy wasn't ready. It's no longer the burden on his shoulders anymore. He was told to be ready for 15 and he was ready for 15. And, you know, if it was a fiasco, not so. And if they only had to be ready for 10, he'd have been overprepared and that would have been fine. So it makes it a no-lose proposition for the people working for you. I love the no-lose proposition. Talk about reducing anxiety. You're going to win no matter what. That's awesome. One of our favorite case studies in the book Anxiety at Work is one that you gave us with the Navy SEALs, the taskers and the optimizers. Walk us through that and how it can help us better understand dealing with overload in the workplace. One of the things the Navy SEALs are famous for are these hazing rituals. They call it hell loop. These guys are just put through physical torture and they don't get to sleep and it's uncomfortable. What they're really testing for is this commitment to teamwork, this presence of mind under pressure, the ability to cope with real horrible physical and emotional demands. What they studied was the behavior of people towards these massively demanding and uncertain environments. They found there were two kinds of people that tackled them. The first kind of person tried to optimize. They tried to figure out where they would best put their time and think through how much energy should I put on this task and how much should I reserve for the last. The taskers just met the challenge that came at them, said, good, that's behind me, went to sleep, you know, got woken up when the next challenge was, tackled that, went to sleep. They sort of chunked it up much more, whereas the optimizers were trying to create a kind of a flow where no flow existed. And what they found as they went back and studied this was that the optimizers didn't get enough rest. They were trying to impose certainty on an uncertain circumstance. So instead of meeting the moment and overcoming it and moving on, they were just kindly moment to moment to moment and very stressed out by it. And I think that has metaphors. Not all of us are fortunately under the stress of what being a Navy SEAL is all about. But all of us are faced with those kinds of situations where we have to decide, do I just grapple with the task at hand and get that behind me? Or do I really try to do a little bit longer term plan? And I would argue when uncertainty is really, really high, your taskers do better because they say, I know I can't plan. I'm just going to acknowledge right here I can't plan. So I'm going to deal with what's right in front of me and step back and wait to see what new information comes after that. So how do you know, if I'm a leader, how do I know if somebody is a tasker or an optimizer? How do I help? Well, I think Tom Kolditz wrote a definitive story about this in his wonderful book in extremist leadership And he talks about what these leaders in very very dangerous and unpredictable Situations do and the first thing that they do is they reduce the emotional temperature so they don't add to it They don't make everybody even more crazy, right? They say no. No, let's calm down, take a deep breath, let's step back. Second thing they do is they get their people involved in tasks outside themselves. So it's almost like, Adrienne, you don't give them the choice. You say, okay, for the next 45 minutes, here's what I want you to do. I want you to move this pen from point A to point B, and this is why I want you to do it, and when I learn more, I'll come back and tell you. So what you're doing is you're creating a tasking situation for your people by protecting them from themselves almost. And then the third thing they do is they exhibit competence, right? They show like, here's what we're gonna do and here's why I think it's gonna work. And all of this is built on a foundation of trust. And the way that Tom talks about trust is you build up trust slowly over a long time and you build up your trust bank in peacetime and that's what helps you prepare for the hard times. That's so true, I love that idea. You build up trust so that when you do get it, then we will all get into these times. So another thing you talked to us about was this idea of prioritizing. I love the metaphor you used of sort of boxes on a truck, which I've since used. But help us understand how to apply this. And, you know, tell us about that story of the visiting professor, too, when you were at Wharton? Oh, it was a great old story going back to my early days with Ian McMillan, who was my professor, my counselor, my mentor at Wharton, and I worked in his entrepreneurial center. And as it happened, I was in charge of the major research program there. So a lot of PhD students, this is how they earn their way through graduate school, you know, we take on research jobs or something like that, and my job was to look after the research program. So I supervised a whole team of undergrads and other master's students and researchers doing a variety of different projects. And at the time, so I commuted about an hour and a half to get to Philly. I live in Princeton, so I was commuting. I had little, little kids. I think I just had our son when I was at that time. And so he would have been two, right? So I had a two-year-old, a long commute, visits to campus. And so my point is just, like, I was busy. I'm not whining, but it was busy. So I would plan my day on campus for those days that I was there. And it was every minute was accounted for because I was running this research program and I had to meet with the undergrads and I had to do all these things. And so I show up one morning ready to dig into my day and Mac turns up with this visiting scholar from, I think it was Singapore, and he says, I'd like you to meet Dr. Bok Sing Kong from Singapore National University, a very esteemed person. This is great. And here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to take him to a couple of classes in the morning. And then here's a chit for lunch at the faculty club. Treat him to a really nice lunch at the faculty club. And then we've got a visiting scholar giving a presentation in the afternoon. And then he's set to meet with Ned Goldman or somebody at the end of the day. And I'm looking at him. And you could just imagine what's going on behind my eyes. I'm like, my whole day that I have spent a week planning for what's going to be accomplished this day, it has just gone up in smoke. So I said to him, lovely to meet you, you know, Dr. whoever you are, Matt, can I talk to you for a sec? And we said, we went in the other room. I said, I get it. If you think the most important thing I can do with this day is this activity of entertaining this visiting scholar, if that's really what you think I should do, that's okay. But let me explain to you all the things that are not going to happen if I have to do that today. He had no idea. I mean, he had no idea. The metaphor that we came to use was, it's like my day is like a truck and the truck is full. I've planned it all. It's all there. And so if somebody wants to add something in addition to the truck, it's not that I automatically say no because maybe that is really important, but let's have a mutual conversation about what comes off the truck. And so he had no idea. So his eyes were big and round. And basically what he was trying to do was get this guy on my truck and off of his truck for the day. And so we figured out a way of getting his chief of staff and one of the visiting scholars to accomplish effectively the same thing that would have led all the way through that. So I think that's a really wonderful metaphor of how do you develop these contracts for mutually agreeable activity, where the stuff comes off the truck and you decide you make a conscious decision about what's coming and going from your truck. That's a great metaphor. I love that. You know one of the things that we've written a lot about and has got a lot of traction is this idea of perfectionism. Perfectionism in the workplace. You see that leaders can help people work through their fear of failure but they have to develop a learning on the go culture. I love that. Can you explain what some of the key features of this kind of culture is and how it can actually reduce anxiety? So I think the the fear of not being perfect comes from the kind of leadership that sort of says well Why does spreadsheet, you know, sell e4 not not have the same value as spreadsheet sell W 22x And and that's just the wrong Discipline to impose on people when things are highly uncertain. So I'll give a couple of examples. In the world of sort of PR, I decided to, oh, I'd really like to see about a subscription offer. And so my team kind of got on it and figured out what the right platform would be and how you can get that to happen and everything. And so four weeks later, we had a subscription offer. Now, was it elegant? No. Did the whole PR machinery around it unfold in this beautiful symphony? No. Did we make a bunch of mistakes? Did we publish some stuff in a weird place? Did we get the headline for newsletter A mixed up with the headline for newsletter B? Totally. But we now have a subscription offer where we didn't before. And I'm totally cool with the 25% of stuff that, whoa, we got to fix that. But the 75% of let's get this in the world happened. And I think that's where you need to have your bias for better to have something in the world that's a little imperfect, as long as it's not something dangerous or something really harmful. If you're talking like a business problem, let's get it in the world and let the world help us make it better, rather than let's hang out in our cave waiting for the perfect blossom to emerge. By then, the world may have changed outside the cave and you don't even know it. It's so true. We once met a mountain climber, very famous, and he says, you know, he says it's amazing how many climbers stay at the bottom. They try and plan all their route and said, you know, the best of us, you get on the wall and you start climbing. And yeah, you might reach and you might have to work your way back, but you're up and you're moving. And he says, that's how you climb the mountain. You know, Adrian, it kind of reminds me of, you know, getting in motion is so important. I'll never forget, you know, my dad, we were on a trip and I said, are we lost? He goes, maybe, but wherever we're going, we're making great time. I love it, Rita. Now, before we, I have got another question for you, but I want to find out or have our listeners understand how they can find you where you would point them. Sure, well, the first place to stop is probably RitaMcGrath.com. That's my personal website and there you'll find all kinds of stuff, downloadable content and links to articles and videos and all kinds of introductions to the world of Rita. And as you know, I've recently launched a sister company called Valise. So Rita is sort of about great ideas and Valise is about great capabilities. And so on the Valise site, which is V-A-L-I-Z-E. We have a section called Deeper Dive. And if this kind of stuff intrigues you, again, we have links to articles, lots of videos, instructional things you can look at. We've got some downloadable tools that you can use. And so that's another good place to visit and see what we're up to. As if you're not busy enough, teaching at Columbia, book writing, one business now, a second business. Yeah, boy, do you know about uncertainty that's awesome uh... you know you've you've written quite a bit in hpr especially about you know this idea of what what business people do in uncertainty whether you're small business person whether you're running a division or a big company a lot of people seem to be a little frozen in the headlights they get paralyzed and a lot of time it's the fear of failure maybe a lack of trust that you talked about. Of course, in this economy, inaction is understandable, but for those who face fear and get stuck, how can leaders prevail in uncertain times? I know you've talked about some practices leaders can use to get yourself and people moving again, so maybe talk about that if we feel stuck right now. I think the best thing to do when you're stuck is to do something. And whether that's a small thing or whether that's a somewhat more aggressive thing, I think it's taking a step into what could be the future. And the way I talk about this is think about checkpoints. So I've got an idea that three years from now the world could look a certain way. Well, how would I determine whether that makes sense or not? Well, rather than take the whole plan and try to plan it all out like our optimizers, what maybe you should do is pick something small that you could actually test out with perhaps a couple of customers that isn't too much of a stretch and that isn't too much of a downside if it doesn't work out the way that you expected and treat it as an experiment. I think that's really where I would start, which is something small, something doable where you can frame it as an experiment. And if that's successful, then you can see what that taught us and then you can take the next step. And this is really helpful for your people as well. I think one of the things leaders tend to do when they're in high uncertainty is they know they've got all this experience and all this gut and all this richness, you know, and so they kind of step in in front of their people. They don't let their people try things for themselves because either they're scared or they're uncertain or they're in a rush or whatever. And that just undercuts the capability building process. So what you really need to be thinking about is how do I frame the situation so the downside is protected and so that people directionally know where they want to go but where I can let them have the actual experience of rising to this challenge and overcoming it rather than short cutting it and doing it for them. Excellent, excellent. You know it is so interesting just getting in motion, right, a small task. It's an experiment. Let's get moving. I think one of the tough things that happens around uncertainty is letting go of past mistakes and trying to envision that better future. Isn't it human nature to dwell on those mistakes and hesitate on envisioning the future? How do you get people to let go and move on. And by the way, I want to take copious notes on this because I have a real tough time in letting go of past mistakes. And isn't it funny? Even when you thought you've let go, there are those moments where it all comes rushing back. So coach me up, doctor. Oh, sure. So it's a bit like the old joke about, you know, how many Southerners does it take to change a light bulb, right? And how many does it take? Well, it takes about 20. It takes one to change the lightbulb and 19 to talk about how good the old one was. Which is not meant to be dismissive of Southerners at all. It's sort of this hunger for nostalgia, this long, this reliance on the past. I think the first thing you want to think about is a concept I call forward only thinking, which is if I were to stop the world today and somebody else were to take over my body, and I were just an observer for the next half day, what would they do if they came into this whole situation fresh and had to make decisions based on where I am right now? What would they do differently? So that's one that I can recommend. It's forward-only thinking. The past can be lovely memories, but it's the past. Sometimes a symbol can help. So a symbolic shift, a symbolic burial. At a corporate level, I had a client whose company was the product of a merger of three different companies and they had never gelled. Let's say they were yellow, red and blue. You have conversations about the blue people. They would say, well, of course they said that. She's yellow. You know how that goes. There's a new CEO comes in and he's like, wait, this merger happened 10 years ago and you people are still in each other's throats. So he said, all right, we got to break this and I'm going to do something symbolic to break it. And what he did was he sent out a note on a Friday and he said, okay, anything that anybody has in the office, I don't care if it's tchotchkes, you guys, awards, employee of the month, anything you want from the previous entities that we created from, you take it home because if it is here over the weekend, it is going to disappear. And so a lot of people ignored him. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, corporate speak. And then they didn't pay attention to him. So he took his senior team, so his senior team of about 15 people, and they went through the building top to bottom, every cubicle, every door, everything with like a shopping cart. And then he had ordered, this was for the Monday, he'd ordered a coffin to be placed on the center of the conference table on the following Monday. And he video streamed this like the whole organization. He put all they had, he had his team, all his team, because they were split too, right? They were all yellows and reds and greens. And so he had his team each put the items from the previous administration inside the coffin and he gave them each a hammer and a nail and they literally had to nail the coffin shut and it got wheeled out of the conference room and he was like, okay, that's that new day. Now we start, now that's a little dramatic and that's not gonna work for every culture but I think as an individual, you can make a symbolic break. You can say, okay, how do I, let me spend two weepy mornings on the sad movie looking at all those things that happened and I'm gonna clean up my clinic, move out of the way and okay, I'm gonna clear the desk and get started on what's next. And I think sometimes you have to give yourself permission to mourn a bit, but then, you know, like, let's move on. Love that. Yeah, yeah, just yeah, as our good friend Marshall Goldsmith says is just move on. Yeah, I remember, yeah, a CEO we read about that just ripped out the parking lot entrance, you know, whatever it is, the little, you know, arm, because the employee said, why do we have this? It's a remnant of the old world. They said, who's coming to our building and parking unless we want them there? And so it was just the symbolic. I love that idea of the symbols that can be very powerful, Rita. That's so great. Can I get another one that I asked? Yes, absolutely. And it shows how these things hang around, right, long after they're no longer appropriate. So one of my clients is Goldman Sachs and they just moved this brand spanking new gorgeous building but of course the new building came after 9-11. And once we had 9-11, you know, you had guards on the floors of every building, had to be signed in. So anybody who was actually in the building was okay. They'd already been screened and anybody suspicious had been stopped. But for the previous 80 years, Goldman Sachs had had this policy that all the restrooms had entrance keys, right? And so if you were a visitor to Goldman Sachs, and you happen to be a lady, you would have to go get the code to the ladies room from whoever had it in the in the steno pool or whatever to let yourself in. And so their their head of operations is this absolutely brilliant guy says to me, so we were about to install these key codes in all the laboratories, you know, in the new building, and I stopped them and said, hang on, we now have full-on security, like at the ground floor. Nobody who's on any of our customer-facing floors is going to need to... Why are we doing this? But it's a beautiful... We always did it that way. We always had key codes to get into the back door. And I'm sure the guy said, it's just another level of security that is completely unnecessary. Exactly. But I thought, you know, it's such a day-to-day illustration, how these things just stick with you if you don't actually think about them. If you don't push that, which is kind of probably the last question I want to ask is a question we're getting asked a lot, and I'd love your thinking on the future of work. If you have your crystal ball, which actually people pay you to have a crystal ball, is five, 10 years out. You know, what's the tale from this pandemic? What's the tale from kind of remote work, everything that's going on? What are you seeing right now that you're advising your clients to say, be aware of this, this and this, because this is what the future of work looks like. Yeah, well, I think this is one of those great scenarios where prediction is gonna serve you less well than preparedness. And I think what I tend to do is take two or three or four scenarios and then see which ones are sending me stronger signals as more information comes in. So there's one really strong signal which is echoed in the popular imagination. Ah, the office is done, it's sweatpants forever. Right, so that's one camp. And then there's another camp that's like, oh no, no, no, no, it's butts in seats, right? And we need to get back to corporate culture and that's what we need to have. And then there's this weird amalgam of stuff in the middle which is maybe a little in the office, maybe a little at home, maybe this, maybe that. And I think what's probably gonna emerge from those is some mishmash none of us has ever thought of. So all those butts in seat CEOs, yeah, that'll be great until they lose the top 12 people they just spent millions of dollars recruiting last year because they're like, I'm gonna commute and sit in an office all day with headphones on to do coding, I don't think so, thank you very much. And so I don't think that policy is going to survive first crash with reality and I don't think the people that are like, we're all going to be remote because there's a lot that we've lost by being remote. So I think we're going to get a lot smarter. I think the things you can count on is whatever comes next, we're going to have to be much more deliberate about it than we were when we could just count on everybody blundering into the office at the same time. And that applies whether it's hybrid, whether it's wholly in person, whether it's partly in person, we're going to have to think about that. And a lot of companies in the recession, let's not forget that, sorry, in the pandemic, a lot of companies in the pandemic have hired people who physically cannot be commuters to the office. So they have already, without anybody really making a big policy about it, they've made a commitment to a remote workforce at some level. And so I think there's, you can really predict the companies that are going to do well are the ones that are being thoughtful about it. Now, if you're going to be a butts in seat, seven days a week kind of place, then I think if that's the kind of person you want to attract, be honest about it, be upfront. There may be people to whom that is very attractive. Fast track, get ahead, heads down, you're cheek by jaw with the decision makers, adrenaline going 12 hours a day, if that's what you want, this is the place you should work. If you're kind of a work-life balance, I'd like to take a walk and listen to the birds on the lunch hour, not the place for you. And I think that's a perfectly legitimate choice, but I prefer people make it explicitly than that they just kind of blunder around assuming everybody knows what's going on when they don't. Ah, clarity. You've got to love it. I mean, we shouldn't be having to teach this concept, but you're exactly right, we do, because so many of us get so busy and we forget these, you know, as we say, it's common sense uncommonly practiced. So, thank you Rita for your such valuable work on uncertainty and innovation. If our listeners haven't checked out one of Rita's books, please pick them up. They are a treasure trove. This has been such a great discussion Rita. Now, if you have to summarize a couple of ideas you'd like people to take away from our conversation today, what would you say? So the first is that we're in uncertainty and you can't opt out. Sorry, not a choice. Everybody's in the same boat. So learn to use the tools of uncertainty and they come from the world of innovation. And what people don't understand is it's a discipline. It's different than what we're used to, but it's a discipline. So you can get smarter about that. You can learn about that. And probably a good place to start is my previous book, Discovery Driven Growth. That's a good place. The second thing is that we know uncertain circumstances are not necessarily dangerous circumstances. They're just circumstances where we're not quite sure what the outcome is. So I think if you approach it in this episodic way, like in small bites, rather than trying to eat it all off at once, like our taskers, I think that'll be a much more productive way to approach it than trying to sort of absorb it all yourself and think about what the grand solution is. Excellent, excellent. Well, listen, we knew this would be a great fun. You've got such a positive energy about you, Rita, and so accomplished. Thank you for taking the time and sharing what you know and helping our listeners get through uncertainty, help them build a little resilience and at the same time get some stuff done. Absolutely. I love the rituals. Yeah, because, you know, let's face it, we're in business to stay in business, right? We've got to get stuff done. Got to get stuff done at some point. Got to pay the bills. Okay. Thanks, Rita. This has been great. Thanks, guys. Lovely to see you again. Adrian, Rita McGrath, 15 pages of notes. I mean, how cool. The folks we get on our podcast here, Rita McGrath, you know, a renowned professor at Columbia Business School, who really is one of the world's experts on uncertainty. And, you know, first thing she says is, look, we, as leaders, we've got to absorb much of the uncertainty for our people. We're putting it on them and it's not fair. Yeah, and be really specific. I loved her example in the insurance company. A general question, like, are you ready? There's too much ambiguity. There's too much uncertainty. I don't know what that means. Are you ready? Ready for what? And when they got much more specific, it was everybody wins. It was a no-fail situation. Yeah, I know, you know, she taught us this idea of the taskers versus the optimizers at the Navy SEALs Hell Week, but I've also heard this from marathon runners who say, no, no, I look to the next point on the horizon that telephone pole 200 yards away That's what I'm working toward. I'm not working toward 26 miles right bite of the time Yeah, and creating those tasking situations. You know one of the things It's really funny that I took away from this and I've heard the seal story many times is that the optimizers never got enough rest I rest. I thought about that. That's anxiety. You're going over in your head again and again and again instead of the taskers that are going, oh, okay, time to sleep. Yeah. Got that done. Yeah, exactly. So then we moved into this idea of prioritizing. And it's such a, I'm always repeating this idea of your day is a truck with boxes on it. And you have to be honest with people. Now, she told a wonderful story about this professor coming in, but the only reason she was able to have that conversation with her manager about, hey, if I do this, this is going to happen, is that there was trust in the relationship. And so I loved what she said, is you build trust up before the crisis hits. Yeah, yeah. And then small and doable tasks. I love that. Just get started. You were saying, get on the wall. I'll tell you the thing that I loved right at the end was that forward only thinking and allowing to let go from the past and then those symbolic gestures, you know, the coffin, are you kidding? How great is that? Everybody comes to work and then they nail the coffin shut. Yeah. It just, you know, like she said, that doesn't work for everybody. That would totally work for me. I would love that. Well, you could just see it being brought up over and over again with somebody, but hey, back in 2011, we tried that. Ted, do you not remember the coffin? You could just see that being brought up. So I love that idea. So many good stuff. I really liked, like you said, that forward-only thinking, but also what should we do as managers? We frame the situation so that people feel positive about where they're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that going to her websites and the stuff that she's creating, I mean she's so generous with all of that. If you haven't researched Rita McGrath, you should do it. It's well worth your time. Well, you know, we always love to give a shout out to our Lifeguides sponsor. You know, it's really interesting. I keep thinking, you know, Rita is a lifeguide for so many people. You know, walked in their shoes, can give you great advice. Well, you know, Lifeguides is this peer-to-peer community. It helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors, giving you a personal guide that's walked in your shoes and experienced the same challenges you have. And they've given us such a generous offer to show that you care about your team and that you want them to navigate through all this uncertainty. All you got to do is go to lifeguides.com forward slash schedule a demo, add the code healthy2021 in the free text box to receive two months of free service. And all of this will be in the show notes, by the way, Rita's websites, Lifeguides, the offer, it'll all be there for you. for all of you who have listened in. If you like the podcast, please share it. We'd also love you to join our online community, wethrivetogether.global, where we're creating a safe place to talk about anxiety and mental health in the workplace. Well, we'll see you again in about a week with any kind of luck. Adrian, close us out. Oh, well, thank you everybody for joining us. If you enjoyed this, please download the Download the podcast so we can continue building up this this movement around Removing the stigma of mental health at work. We encourage you to check out our new book anxiety at work and thank you everybody We wish you the best of mental health this week. Take care and be well