Jeff Dewing
Hi and welcome to Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors, the podcast where you get to meet people who are not afraid to stand up and call out bad practice or injustice. People who own their mistakes, they thrive from challenges and who ultimately choose only to see the summit and not the mountain. I'm Jeff Dewing. I'm an entrepreneur, the author of bestselling book Doing the Opposite and a keynote and masterclass speaker.
 
 Today, you're going to be Morra Aarons-Mele. Morra is somebody that I'm familiar with - I appeared on her podcast last year. Her specialty subject is surrounding her latest book called the Anxious Achiever. It's about people that are high achievers that suffer anxiety. Morra - she's a movement builder! She's an expert in helping people talk about the hard stuff. Morra knows that taking your mental health seriously is the leadership strength. She hosts the Anxious Achiever podcast for LinkedIn Presents, which won the 2023 Media Award for Mental Health America, and was also the 2020 Webby Awards Honoree, 2022 best commute podcast - Signal Award winner and is frequently a top 10 management podcast and top 15 business podcast. She's passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their own success.
 
 So Hi Morra, welcome to the show. I'm so glad that you could join us from across the pond. I'm really looking forward to today's conversation.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Same here here, Jeff. I loved having you on my podcast.
 
 Jeff Dewing
Brilliant. So, Morra, can we just start for the benefit of the audience, Perhaps you could just give us a whistle-stop tour of Morra, what Morra does, what her purpose in life is, and try and give us some understanding about what is it that gets you out of bed every day. What is it that drives you?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
So I am driven by the idea that people can be happier at work. Basically, I always have been. I wanted to be a workplace therapist when I was 27 years old, 28 years old, 29 years old - I'm 47 now and I came up in the early internet, working at the first sort of dot-coms that were around in 1999 onwards, and that was really exciting. And then I worked in US politics, which was a passion of mine, applying what I had learned working in dot-coms, and through it all I had to manage my own mental health, which was very up and down and very dramatic at times. And that was back in the days before we had mentorship and teaching people how to be leaders and work-life balance. It was just a very different world back then. I'm sure you remember, and I really struggled.
 
 And I think I reached a point when I was on my 10th job in my third country, in my fifth US state, where I just thought, ‘gosh, maybe work is also a problem’.
 
 I clearly am not thriving, but work is a problem and I thought, ‘gosh, what if I could help people understand themselves so that they could work in ways that suited their temperament, their personality, their character, so that they could do the best they could’, and that was what I wanted to do. But for whatever reason, I went to graduate school to become a clinical social worker so that I could be a therapist. I also got my master's at Harvard in public administration. I never was able to make that dream possible because financially I really needed to earn money. So I kept doing my political consulting and I started a business and it was amazing and that was called Women Online and I sold that business two years ago and I thought this is the time, this is the time. And so for about a year and a half now, I've been really working on my passion, which is better mental health at work and helping people figure out how to work in the way that their brain needs them to work.
 
 Jeff Dewing
So during that journey, it's almost like you always knew what you wanted, but you had to wait until that time when you felt it was sustainable for you as an individual to be able to drive. It seems like you sold your business and you saved it at that time. But during your things you've learned. What common threat have you seen with people or organizations that you speak to when you're trying to break down these barriers of how to think and manage your own expectation?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Expectation. You just hit it. You just hit it. Expectations are a huge factor that are just often completely ignored and left undiscussed and that creates a tremendous amount of anxiety.So my specialty is helping anxious leaders, anxious teams, and what I've learned so in all the time that I was writing about and blogging about and podcasting about workplace mental health I was a consultant and I was working inside large organizations of all different kinds the world's largest organizations and there were two themes that emerged and I think that they're really, really important.
 
 The first is that people don't understand expectations. They don't understand their own expectations, which are often stories we've been telling ourselves since we were kids, that we've internalized other people's expectations. We're driven by invisible expectations that stress us out often and make us really anxious. We don't understand other people's expectations of us. No one ever tells us ‘what does good look like’, ‘what does as soon as possible mean’ like really basic stuff, but also fundamental stuff, right? What does it mean to be part of a team? What's our goal here?
 
 I'm shocked at how many companies I work in really famous companies where people are just sort of like milling around, not aligned, because nobody has expectations clear. And then also, what do I expect of other people, and are they on target and are they just constantly leading me to disappointment or micromanagement or controlling behaviour or confusion? And then the second piece is this culture of urgency that I, as someone who had my first job when email was just starting and now I'm working in the world of Slack and constant communication, has just, I think, become a crisis and is really ruining people's ability to function at work well.
 
 Jeff Dewing
The reason I'm fascinated about this subject is because I, just as a leader and running a quite a reasonable sized business, I've stumbled across some stuff because we're all wired.

We're all wired from our parents expectation, command and control and you've got to show strength and you know the leaders expect to have all the answers, all those things that we've all been taught, right until the penny drops and you start engaging different types of people. So in my case, I joined a peer group and with that statement that everyone's heard cliche ‘it’s very lonely at the top’, who do you talk to? Who do you really confide? You can't find your teams all the time kind of confide in your partner or your wife. So who do you talk to? At least things that are experienced in this thing. So the peer group became a big issue. But then what happened is, during the journey I suddenly became fascinated by how people behave, how they respond and what makes them feel safe, what makes them flourish? What are the things that do that? Rather me give an expectation and I wonder things that really shone a light was Covid because something happened. Everyone was sent home.
 And what happened when everyone got sent home? They had the time to do something they'd never been given the time or never taken the time. That was to reflect, to think ‘what is it that I want out of life?’ You know, because people just never had the time to do that and that suddenly had an impact where I watched businesses and leaders comment on, the so-called ‘great resignation’, the other people leaving because they can get jobs anywhere now, and it's ridiculous. They’re all getting it wrong. It’s nothing to do with greed.  It’s to do with ‘how do I live a life that makes me happy’? It's not about money. It's not about whether I like the leader or the boss. Of course, all that comes to play, but it was about what is it I actually want to get out of life? Because people just don't get the time.
 
 So, well, then happened, we did something that was very courageous and brave, and we just said ‘let the people decide’. Talk to us, communicate, communicate, communicate - three most important words of business and have conversations, and you'd have your kids or your family or your brother or your sister. Why is it we behave differently at work than we do when we're home? Why don't we behave in exactly the same way? Because life is about relationship and it that suddenly, for me and for some businesses, accelerated at drive to create this workplace environment that was as safe and as happy as the home environment. Because you didn't have this fear of saying what you believe, saying what you thought.
 
 And a little story I want to share with you. One of my members of my family is a carer and in the UK caring is not particularly a sought after industry because it's low paid, long hours. It's challenging, yet so it is. It's not a good place, but when you're a care and you care, you want to make a difference. So even in the care industry, you had this top down approach that's about revenue, finance, profit, etc etc. And these carers don't get the opportunity to share ways and means of doing things more effectively because the leadership shuts them down and says, no! These companies are missing out on so much.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Okay, there's a few things I want to say to that. I agree with you that covid was a forcing function for us to change so many things. You know, and the truth is - and I only have US data - most people are very engaged at work. Actually, people are more engaged at work now than they ever have been before. So, something about the way that we've begun working since covid has made knowledge-workers happier, and I think it's pretty clear that that's flexibility, you know, and so that's the good news!
 The other thing is that I saw recent, a recent survey I think it's from Gallup or Society for Human Resource Management. I think it was from Gallup - 60% of Americans are happy at work. They like their community, they feel that they have purpose. Again, that's really positive, and so I don't want to discount the positive, because I think also what we learned during the pandemic is that we rely on each other at work. Our communities and our relationships at work are hella important, and so I think that's really important to think about. But, at the same time, levels of burnout globally are increasing. Mental health globally is decreasing. We see a huge crisis among younger people, young adults especially, reporting extremely high rates of depression and anxiety and hopelessness, and so that's also happening, and so I think this is a situation where two things can be true, where we've been doing a lot of things better and yet we're also doing a lot of things really wrong, both systemically and individually, and how we manage people.
 
 Jeff Dewing
It's interesting because I want to get context for my audience, because I talk a lot about this stuff, because in the UK Only 11% of workers are engaged. That was up to 2021. Across the globe, only 20% people are engaged. When you're surveying 160,000 people from 54 different countries, and I use that information not as a shockwave, but a realistic reality check that says, ‘guys, in the UK, 89% people do not want to be where they are’. That's a problem. And if they don't want to be where they are, that's got to drive anxiety, it's got to drive depression, it's got to drive all those things. So, therefore, if we don't realize that that's the problem we have to solve first, then we're all barking up the wrong tree.!And the same applies to globally from the Gallup survey in 2022.
 
 Now what I do know although I've not seen the survey yet from a UK perspective - what I do know is that if I look at my business and businesses like mine, where people have been given the freedom and I use freedom in two ways in our business freedom is so, so important, but you cannot give freedom without clarity. Otherwise you get chaos, right. So as long as you've got absolute clarity on the outcomes that we're all agreeing and negotiate to achieve, then you get the freedoms for sure. But what I talk about with the human psyche what does every human being want and need. They need autonomy, they need mastery and they need purpose and if you can nourish those three things in the right way, then you get a happy person. They need to control or influence their destiny and then they bring their whole selves to work or to the project. But when I see different surveys going on in the UK where they say ‘statistics have revealed that the optimum time is three days in the office and two days at home’, I’m going ‘really’ and it's like these narratives and these little pockets of information!
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
It's so wrong.
 
 Jeff Dewing
I know, I know. And then they say then this comes over. We're now investigating and trialing a four-day week. I say ‘guys, you're missing the primary issue’. The second you constrain somebody, you're removing elements or totality of freedom and, by default, you put them straight back into the same spots. You've got to let them manage their lives and trust the fact that they would deliver the outcomes you've agreed, because people are very clever.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
People are very clever and you know, there's been a survey in the US of working Americans for over 40 years and year on year. What it shows is called the National Employment Survey is that autonomy and agency are more important to most workers than a pay raise. Agency!
 
 And to me. I mean I very much focus, when I work with companies, on the team level, because the most flexibility happens on teams, right, you can work for a giant company that says you have to be in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but most teams are like Meh! And I think that's great, right, because you have the most opportunity for flexibility, for psychological safety, for all the good things at the team level, even if you're in a system that isn't great, which, frankly, most companies are not, and so I think that's important also for your listeners to think about. If they don't, maybe your audience might be more leaders and CEOs, but for a lot of people, you know, if they have some level of agency within their own colleagues, what can they do?
 
 Jeff Dewing
It's also about having those really wonderful questions… we've tried to build a fantastic culture, and a fantastic culture is a number of authentic actions that people believe from the top down. And one of the things that we say in business we get our teams to ask each other all the time is ‘within your role, within your job, what do you love’?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Yeah, yeah!
 
 Jeff Dewing
And what do you not love. So they'll write down what they don't love and we say we'll stop doing them then. You're not allowed to do anything you don't love because one of the things that we operate, which is Patrick Nantioni, his principles of the six geniuses which identifies what frustrates people versus what energizes people. I always use this as an example I apologize for it like this before, but one as a simplicity example one of the things I hate in my role is doing my expenses. I'd put pins in my eyes before I do my expenses and I just tried an example that we went on this journey and there was four people in my team that were finance people who said ‘we love doing expenses! Can we do your expenses’? And that was the point to say trust me, because people are different and want different things and get energized by different things.
 
 You know finance people love numbers and number crunching and details and assets, and you know all these different stuff. There's things you don't love. There will be somebody in your team or even in your organization that loves what you don't love. So and it's like I use the football analogy that if you have a striker that scores hundreds of goals, you don't put him in goal. What you play them in position, you play them in the place where they're best suited.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Listen. As a volleyball player who's six foot two, I wasn't in the back row very much!!
 
 Jeff Dewing
But again, so for me is when you can truly drive these messages that says you are not allowed to do what you don't love. You've got one job! Go and find somebody in your organisation that does love it and then work with them to manage that situation, because then you're taking away all these negative elements. That goes well, we've got to have to do that. Well, don't find someone else that'll love to do it, and you take people on that journey. But it's got to be repetitive, it's got to be consistent and it's got to be revisited, because that's how you keep the momentum going. So little things like that builds trust in an organisation.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
I love that, right! I mean, it's funny. I try to do that with my kids and their chores. You know, right, like is there a chore that you don't mind doing? It's about agency and the other thing that also I think is really important, because I work with a lot of really sort of classically high achievers, right, people who went to the fanciest law schools or the fanciest business schools or medical schools, and what I find with them is that they might be into their 30s before they realize I don't really love what I've been excelling at on paper for 15 years. I can't tell you how many lawyers I've worked with and met who've been like ‘man, I don't actually think I love this’. And then you have some real questions.

Jeff Dewing
I also use other tools. We talk about Iki-Gai, so the loose meaning of Iki-Gai's Japanese term is the meaning of life, and it's about how do you help human beings achieve the ultimate reason for them being on a planet, and that is ‘fulfilment’. How do you help someone achieve fulfilment? And fulfilment is different things than it would be, and it asks four simple questions what do you love? What are you good at? What difference in the world are you gonna make, and can you get paid for it? Because you need to be sustainable.
 
 Now you ask an 18-year-old student coming out of school, they won't have a clue because they've not gone through life experience. But if you're 30, 35, 38, 40, maybe, you really have a great opportunity to understand what it is that's gonna drive you to the end game whatever that end game is and my unfortunate element is that I didn't discover it until 10 years ago, so I missed out on an awful lot of opportunity. But for me, I'm very, really clear on what's gonna make me happy by answering those four questions.
 
 Now, you can't do it in a weekend. Some of this will take you a year, because you've got to really dig deep about what is it? I truly love what gets me out of bed punching the air every day.  People want autonomy, mastery and purpose. They clearly have to be able to put food on the table, that goes without saying. But no one jumps out of bed saying ‘I'm being paid a shitload of money’. If they did, it wears off very quickly. It's no different to if you have somebody that's frustrated or concerned or upset, they're not impressed. Or we have the reasons why people draw or drive a monetary outcome. The money is something else. It's a sticky plaster for a bigger problem right when money is gonna potentially solve the problem for a very short space of time. You give somebody a pay rise and they're really excited. They tell their wife, their husband, their family. But a month later they've forgotten about it because now it's just normal, right, that is moved on. So money is usually a sticky plaster for a deeper rooted challenge that they haven't manage and it's about taking the time, effort and care to have the conversation. I say ‘what's really going on’? ‘What could we actually do to help you solve the real root calls which money will only put a plaster over for two, three, four, five weeks’.

 Morra Aarons-Mele
As the Bard said ‘mo money, mo problems’

 Jeff Dewing
Yeah, yeah. But then people say ‘please give me more problems’!!
 
 But again, it's interesting in people's behaviour, what really matters. And I've got so many examples in our business where something similar has happened and we had to sit down. You talk to somebody and you find actually it's got nothing to do with money. So there was some other problem that they're struggling to work out a solution. But they think money will buy them a bit of time, but it actually still doesn't solve the problem. And you feel, well, how about we focus on solving a problem? And they go okay, well, how do we do that? And you can solve it through ideas. Wow, you've just taken all that stress away because now we've solved the problem and you don’t have to give me a pay rise.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Not that you shouldn't give people pay raises! I mean I think that that's often true. I think that part of… I mean I work with people who have a lot of anxiety, and in my own life, my constant struggle is that I hit all the goal posts and the anxiety doesn't go away, and so then you really have to do the hard work of ‘what else is going on.’ I mean I've hit all the marks. I mean nobody has more passion for their work than me. I love it. I feel blessed. I'm doing exactly what I want to do every single day. Like what a gift. Who gets to say that?
 
 Jeff Dewing
I don't know, that's wonderful.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
It's a gift, it's a blessing, and yet the anxiety is still there. And so my book, the Anxious Achiever, is really about that conundrum which I see in so many people, especially high achievers, where the passion is there, the metrics are there, but the anxiety doesn't stop, and so they can never sit still and say, ‘wow, I'm so blessed! Wow, I did it’. And that's a reality too.
 
 Jeff Dewing
But I find that fascinating because I'm also blessed, because I feel like there is nothing can improve in my life. I'm the best I can possibly be and that’s not by design, that's by luck and circumstances and people from the business, and having great people around you. So I'm fascinated by people that are high achievers, do well, they're happy in their life, passionate, but what is that one thing that's eating you away and why is that happening and what can you do about it? Those sort of things fascinate me, and when I - in my peer groups we have people in similar situations and we have the great opportunity to really dig deep and try to understand why they feel the way they do, yeah, and invariably it is something that's an anchor point that goes back in years. There's something clinging onto them from years and years and years ago that is buried far back in their heads and they don't even know what it is. But there's a trigger somewhere, and of course it means well when you think that, then what can you do about it? What can you do to release that trigger?
 
 And again, it is fascinating that the things in life we don't know and the goal is first seek to understand - what is it that's triggering, what is making you do that. But I do find it fascinating, because the best thing you can do, for me, is that if you've got people that are struggling, you've got people that are facing the challenges. I mean, we're coming up to Christmas now, where most people are worried about the cost of Christmas and repaying it next year and all the rest of the bits and pieces. What's interesting is to be able to sit and  talk to your team, talk about it. What is it you're doing? Why are you doing it? And there’s nothing more frustrating than spending a fortune on your three-year-old child's presents and then they spend the entire day playing with one cardboard box.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Right, but it's expectations! Like, what are my expectations? What do I think my kids' expectations are? What does being a good parent look like, right? I mean, we all want to be good, we want to be good parents, we want to be good children, good workers. And so you're right, and that's why I think therapy is one of the best leadership tools there is, because I guess the extreme example is when you look at the billionaires and you always read about these hedge funders who are worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, but they get into these petty feuds and then they won't stop and it's never enough. But there's a lot of people around who aren't billionaires, who are going through something similar, and so that's a really illustrative process to go through, if you feel like that's you.
 
 Jeff Dewing
There's one question people don't ask. Look, they are colleagues, they are peers, even their family. There's one question we are so scared to ask, and that is ‘what could I do better’? ‘What am I not doing well’? We're so frightened of that question. Yeah, it's the most powerful question you could ever ask, because it really gives you insight.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
I hate that question!
 
 Jeff Dewing
I hate it, which proves my point right. That's the one thing that everybody's frightened of.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
You know it's so funny. I was just thinking about it's the end of the year. I like to set goals. I'm a big forward. I like to reflect and then set goals and I thought I think my goal in 2024 has to be soliciting more feedback, because after you give a keynote and you get that email from the event person with your scores… I get so anxious sometimes I'm just not going to read it and what is that about? Right? So yeah, that's my goal!
 
 Jeff Dewing
Yeah, brilliant. So let me just ask you one question. See if you can think of one example, good example. The whole purpose of this podcast is to try and solicit scenarios where people did the opposite of what any human being would have normally have done and achieved an incredible result. So is there anything that jumps to mind in your journey where the world would assume you'd have reacted this way, but you chose to do something entirely different, that went against the status quo, that took you out of your comfort zone, but had incredible results?
             
 Morra Aarons-Mele
It's hard for me to say I've done something well, being an anxious achiever, but there's one thing I've done well and I'm going to share it because I think there's probably a lot of working parents who listen to your podcast and, if not, they will share it, hopefully, with working parents which is that you know for women at least you're raised with an expectation that you cannot possibly have a really active parenting life and a really successful career. It's an unwritten rule and certainly if you go to elite schools, if you're prepared, if you're just gunning your career or whatever you do right. There is an unwritten rule. You can't have it all! Work-life balance! And I had the very good fortune when my first son was a baby to go to a conference and meet a woman named Cali Yost, c-a-l-i-y-o-s-t.
 
 I recommend her work for everyone. She is America's leading expert on high performance flexibility, workplace flexibility, but she has coined a term called work-life fit and she said look, work-life balance is bullshit and we all know that. Everyone has their own work-life fit and you need to know what is yours, what's going to make you happy? If you're a mom and you have a baby and you actually are dying to go to work. That's your work-life fit! You could do it. And I met her and I read her books and I thought, ‘oh my God’, and I, from day one, have refused to fall into the trap that you can't be an active parent and have the career you want, and I had to do it on my own. No corporation was going to help me in that.
 
 I started my own business and from day one, everyone I worked with and hired and me - we had total flexibility. We worked virtually. We never were accountable for our time as long as we did the job well, and there were whole weeks when I wouldn't work, but I had such a great team and when I needed to, I worked like crazy, but I made my own rhythm and that was the biggest blessing of my life. But it came from this fundamental belief that I am not going to subscribe to this horrible, limiting untruth that we tell women, which is that you cannot have the career you want and be an active mom, because that's a terrible way to live your life.
 
 Jeff Dewing
I completely agree. But it also does play into husbands and fathers as well, to a lesser extent, but as an example. The bit I loved about the outcome of COVID and the choices we made as an organisation was we said ‘Let’s look at some basics. What stresses people out’? Well, the husband or the wife saying to their boss – ‘Can I leave early, I've got to pick the kids up from school, my wife's held up, or my husband's held up…. Whatever’. Then ‘well, are you able to work this evening’? ‘Yes, yes, I'll get it sorted’, ‘okay, fine’. So it's a challenging question. The next day the husband is stuck in London. They can't get back to kids. The wife has now got the stress of saying ‘I’ve now got to ask the boss the same question two days in a row.’
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh my God! So stressful.
 
 Jeff Dewing
So the first thing we did because we went on this journey of complete change is we said ‘we will fire you if you do not pick your kids up’. We completely changed the statement and what then happened was suddenly you've got the women. It's typically women, there's a few guys that were stay-at-home Dads, but typically the women would say don't put me any meetings before 10 o'clock because I've got school run. Don't put me any meetingss between two and three weekdays as I've got the school run. It's a written rule. Nobody challenges them because they're the rules.
 
 Right, you look after the people that need to look after their families, and then, of course, they're picking the kids up at three o'clock, which would normally be pick the kids up, drop them over, run back to work, get all these things done so the governor can see I'm back work. We said ‘no, no, no, no. When you get your kids out, you get them ready for soccer practice, you take them to soccer practice, you do their homework, and if you've got time, when the kids have got the bed, to do some of the things you want to do, then by all means do it! But we don't care. What we care about is you're achieving the outcomes’. We'll agree and negotiate it for the end of the month and you do it as and when you see fit. And that changes how people feel about the anxiety every day in their lives.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
It changes everything. And the most powerful thing you do, and again I think this is one thing I did well, is I would totally say to my clients and my team ‘I can't, I have this obligation for my kid’. And sometimes, by just saying the words, you open up the opportunity to take away the stigma and let other people do it too. But there's so much stigma and anxiety and I mean all of us know that horrible, horrible feeling of when the school calls and you're on the meeting and you're texting your husband saying, ‘oh my God, we have to go pick the kid up, I'm on the Zoom’, and it's like the anxiety, the stress, the cortisol.
 
 And you're saying what if that just wasn't necessary, because we're all grown up and we're going to get it done?
 
 Jeff Dewing
So just to bring things to life - I was talking to Gabby today and her kids are running in saying, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, and three, four years ago you'd have gone ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to work, you can’t have the kids around’ and all this nonsense. Whereas now what's happening is because we've become more intimate with our colleagues, that we care about the children, the dog or the thing we love the kids to come and sit on that and say, oh, this is Jeff, or this is Gabby, or this is have a chat. And again, suddenly there's none of this fear about ‘oh, I've got to lock the door, I can't let you in on an important call’. We're saying, ‘no, those days have gone. You are in a call, where you are, we are families, right, and that's the way it works’. And I think suddenly that removes another level of anxiety when you're worried about your kids bursting in. Why?! It's real life, right?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
I mean sometimes you are yeah, and that's okay! I mean that's the other thing sometimes… I can't tell you how many nights I've been stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, you know? I mean that's life, right. So none of this is perfect, and that's. The other thing is that we have to also teach people to accept compromise, and compromise is so important in life. And again, when you're high charging and you have such expectations – no! Life is not about that. Life is about compromise. And the older I get, the more I feel very strongly about helping younger people who've always pushed so hard to just accept that sometimes things suck. Sometimes they really do.
 
 Jeff Dewing
You do, you do.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
And that's okay too, right, you can still have the larger passion.
 
 Jeff Dewing
And I guess the other thing as well is that we've all been wired for them as we've gone from schooling and education that -  it's also about what do I get out of life? How do I benefit from this? And it's like well, why don't you change the question? Why don't you? The question should be how do I help you? And there is no cost to me, help you, I'm not going to help you, but why don't you do this for me? That's not how it works, and the fundamental principle is whatever I want to do, or whatever I want to achieve for the benefit of others, am I creating a wing-wit? Yeah, there can never be a wing-loose right. So if whatever the compromise is, how do we ensure that we both benefit? But we've got to get Peter to be brave enough to do it.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
That's generalised reciprocity, right. There's a whole social science around it with social capital theory, and I was lucky enough at Harvard to take Robert Putnam's course. I don't know if listeners have ever heard of Robert Putnam and his book Bowling Alone. I really recommend it. But his basic point and the point of social capital theory is just what you said. It's the golden rule - do unto others. And we as teams during the pandemic, I think we did that naturally because we were all in it. It was the first time, I think a lot of us felt we're in this together and we're going to give each other grace and space, as my friend Laura Mays says, and I want people to remember that now.
 
 Jeff Dewing
The other thing that COVID taught so much, apart from the bad elements of COVID, which obviously was terrible, but when you look at the things that we learnt as a result of COVID, I’ll never forget our managers, after a couple of surveys, come back to us and said ‘I now know my teams more intimately than I've ever known them in the five years I've been working in the office’. Because you suddenly started having these intimate conversations. That was forced by the environment and Zoom and one-to-ones and seeing the kids and the dogs and asking questions about their lives - stuff that you never, ever did. It was just to pointless chat at the coffee machine and what was love is. As a result, you became more intimate. You became more intimate in caring and understanding about people's whole lives, not just what they did on the spreadsheet at their desk.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
But let me ask you a question, jeff. So for all the many thousands of people who are saying, ‘okay, fine, but hybrid work is difficult. It is harder to manage teams’, what's your advice there? Because there's a dark side to this, which is that we have no boundaries between work and home anymore. The workday has shifted to a 24-hour cycle, which means that many people feel they're never off, they're always on. People sit on Zoom all day long, and you know there's downsides to this too. So how do we find the balance?
 
 Jeff Dewing
Well, that's a great question and it's a question I took very seriously from the very get-go. So this also comes down to culture, leadership, driving from the top. So in our world, you are not allowed to have back-to-back Zoom calls. It's forbidden. You have to have a one-hour gap between calls. It's mandated, right, if you're on a Zoom call, you must break every 40 minutes for a 10-minute get-some-fresh-year-old switch off, walk-away mandated.
 
 And the other thing that we also do in lots and lots of arenas is anybody that works a period of time. For some people it's eight hours if they've got kids, other people it's 12 hours. Some people might say, well, I'm happy it worked. 15 hours. I live alone, I've got nothing else to do, so I enjoy it, right? So different people want different things.
 
 But what is clear is you say tell me what works for you and what doesn't. And what doesn't work for you means you're not allowed to do it. You say something. These are the rules, guys. This is about your health, your mental health. This is more important than anything you're going to do in a day. The key is, no one cares what you say, they care what you do. So your leadership team have to behave in exactly that way every day so that people will understand that it's that important to the business. What you can't do is have a leader working 24 hours a day, demonstrating that they are having back-to-back calls, because that then just collapses. So you have to live your values every single day, and then the people will then live those values every single day, and then you don't get burn out.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
That's exactly right, and you have to set expectations. You say clarity, I say expectations. I think that's what's happening is. I mean, I work with companies where I spend days with them. They're literally in back-to-back meetings. They don't have time for their work and so they do their work in the off hours. They're not moving, they're scrunched into little boxes. I mean, the other thing is, you know, there's a tremendous toll on our physical body!
 
 Jeff Dewing
Of course, yeah, and so you have to get up and walk away for 10 minutes every 40 minutes. You have to have an hour's break in between meetings, one to digest what you just heard, two to prepare for your next meeting and give yourself time, drop your shoulders, breathe, but these are just basic principles. None of this is like rocket science, but it's about having the courage to do things differently.
 
 Right, we're coming to the, we're coming to the end of this more. It's been. It's been a thing. I know it would be fascinating conversation and real easy, flowing but meaningful. But I've got two questions for you, and I don't use the ponder on this and I don't use I don't get anxious over them either, but this is about from the heart. If there was one message that you was going to put out for the audience and you could only have one. What would you say you were most grateful for?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
I'm most grateful for my family, my husband my kids,
 
 Jeff Dewing
Which give you that happiness every day. Right, and that's what it's all about.
 
 Okay, the second question, the final question. If there was only one message that you could give out, what would be the one piece of wisdom or advice you would send out to the audience?
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Pause. Just don't be scared to pause. Do nothing, take a beat, breathe!
 
 Jeff Dewing
Love that! Right, Morra, listen, absolutely loved it. Loved it last time we spoke, loved it even more today. Really felt like we were connecting all the way through that whole journey. So really, really enjoyed it and I hope that path cross again soon. And thank you very much for taking the time today. I really appreciate it.
 
 Morra Aarons-Mele
Thank you so much, Jeff.
 
 Jeff Dewing
That was some conversation, thanks to Morra from across the pond who was it was eight o'clock in the morning. She had to lock herself in the cupboard to keep away from all the kids getting ready for school, bless her. 
 
 But I've spoken to Morra before, which I really enjoyed that conversation, which is why we invited her onto this podcast, because she's not one of these people that theorises why people are anxious or going through a depression. It's something that she lives and has lived a big chunk of her life. So this is something she's talking about from knowledge, not from academia. And to listen to the stories, to listen to the various scenarios that she identified, what people are missing, what companies are missing, what leaders are missing is flexible working! Working from home is not about doing eight hours sitting on a chair in front of a screen. That's not what it's about. Should never been about that, which is why you've got this foggy understanding about flexible working, homeworking, hybrid working because we've not got the basics right, the fundamentals of what that actual working day looks like. And if you don't get those basics right, those guard rails, if you don't get that clarity right, then you do get chaos, you get anarchy, and I think some companies have not realized the value of getting those guard rails in place, are going to have anarchy, and then they can query or challenge the effectiveness of hybrid working or homeworking or flexible working. 
 
 I hope you enjoyed today's episode. My podcast website has had a massive refresh. I'd love you to go and have a look at it and give us your feedback, and, of course, you can listen to all episodes - there's no cost - on your favourite podcast platform or, of course, you can watch the actual video podcast on the YouTube channel, details of which are in the show notes. 
 
 I guess I would love to also give a real good thanks, I do this every episode, but to really emphasise this that my team Nichola Crawshaw from Cloudfm FM, Gabriella, who works very closely with me on the podcast, acquiring the guests and getting the guests ready and Thinking Hat who promote the podcast for me, which is brilliant, and, of course, the producers that produce this incredibly high quality production, What Goes On Media and the team that are essentially Sam Walker and Michael Blades – they do an incredible job. So thank you so much and I can't wait to catch up with you all again. Thanks for listening.