You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.
Today I speak with Dr. Srikumar Rao. Dr. Rao received his Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University, and teaches the immensely popular and pioneering course Creativity and Personal Mastery at The London School of business and the Hass School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he is the author of a new book, Happiness at Work, as well as the Sounds True audio learning series, The Personal Mastery Program: Discovering Passion and Purpose in your Life and Work.
I spoke with Srikumar about this topic of passion and purpose, particularly in the workplace and what makes for lasting fulfillment in life.
Tami Simon: Srikumar, your new book is called Happiness at Work, and this book is coming out at a time where I think more and more people are expressing that they are unhappy at work, especially post-economic downturn, and that many people’s salaries have been cut or frozen in some way. How can you help us be happy at work in this challenging time in which we’re living?
Srikumar Rao: Excellent question, Tami. And thank you for raising it. I run into this all the time. There are a couple things that I would like to point out. Every time we’re in a work situation and we see we’re unhappy, what we’re really doing is living in a “me-centered” universe where we’re focusing all of our attention on “this is how I want the universe to be and darn it, It’s not living up to my expectations!” It’s a good time for us to reflect on what it is that we’re contributing versus what it is that we expect and why aren’t we getting what we expect.
If we spend less of the time focusing on what it is that we do not like and why it is that it’s happening to us and look around for what is actually pretty good in our life and put our emotional energy in that, we’ll be at least happy, if not a whole lot better.
TS: Is it not a “me-centered” universe? I thought it was a “me-centered” universe, Srikumar. It seems like that’s the way that everybody lives, right? It’s about me maximizing my happiness.
SKR: That’s the way everybody lives and fortunately or unfortunately, Tami, if you spend the majority of your time living in a “me-centered” universe, and you interpret everything that happens to you in terms of “ what is the impact of that on me” then you are going to live a not very happy, sometimes miserable, life. That’s just the way it is. If you truly want to live a fulfilled life, the only way is to be part of a cause, which is considerably bigger than yourself and something that brings the greater good to a greater community.
TS: So what you’re saying is that I would be happy at work if I wasn’t focused on how all of this is affecting me? Is that what you’re saying?
SKR: Essentially yes. I do recognize that that’s a lot easier said than done. And most of us will never get there and that’s the bad news. The good news is that even a slight shift that we make in that direction will make a huge impact on our well-being.
TS: Well this might make sense for people who work for non-profits that are doing great work in the world or, of course, if somebody is listening who happens to be employed at Sounds True, they can find a sense of greater meaning and fulfillment. It’s not just about them and their happiness. It’s about the cause that they are working for. Most people, I think, work for places where they may feel neutral about the work that that business is doing. How can they find fulfillment in that?
SKR: Let me tell you something that came up in one of the talks that I gave. One of the people raised their hand and said, “Professor Rao, that’s all very nice” and raised exactly the point you raised, “It’s ok if you’re working for a non-profit that’s doing good things but I work for a company that has just been indicted by the Attorney General of six states.” And then he sat down. The point is, in any place where you are, in any organization where you are, you have a chance to make a difference. You are in touch with people. You’re in touch with your colleagues, bosses, customers, vendors. Do you have the ability to raise their consciousness and help them live up to their potential? And if you look at every single interaction that you have from the point of view of here is an opportunity for me to be of service and get somebody into a higher level of consciousness, make them more comfortable in their own skin and feel better about who they are, then paradoxically, you feel a whole lot better.
I was talking with the senior executives in the major pharmaceutical/ healthcare firms and every single person in that room ran multiple countries and this was a company where the profits were down and all kinds of reorganization was happening, and there was a great deal of tension in the air. Many of the people present in the room knew that some of them would not be there in that meeting a year from that date. In my talk I pointed out that if you define your job in functional terms, like, “I create marketing programs,” or “I prepare balance sheets, income statements, and reconcile them.” If that’s how you define your job then you are either burned out or heading toward that. But, I pointed out to them, look, here’s a middle-aged man who had a heart attack and it’s your stint that gave him a chance to live a proper life. Here was this beautiful woman who was in a car accident and went through the windshield and her face is all cut up and it’s your sutures that gave her a chance to have her looks back. Go meet that middle-aged man and go talk to the woman who went through the windshield: that is why you get up in the morning. And if that’s not why you get up in the morning, then you’re not going to be very happy where you are in any position of the organization.
So yes, there are a lot of organizations that are “ho-hum,” but ultimately somewhere in that non-existence, they are doing something that is genuinely of benefit to people; seek that out. And then, if you feel that it’s not doing enough, it’s incumbent on you from whatever position you are in to try and engineer a shift so it is doing more of a benefit. And in your attempt to do that, regardless of how little impact you think you’re going to have, if you make the sincere attempt, it will repay you in space in terms of how you feel.
TS: So you believe that every business is either already currently contributing in some positive way in this world, and we could discover that, or it could contribute in some positive way?
SKR: Yes. It could contribute in some positive way and if you feel that it’s doing so much and could be doing a lot more, and then you have just defined your purpose. Help make that happen. Find other people who feel the same way. There’s always much more power in numbers so start building a coalition and start pushing it that direction, and all of a sudden, you become a part of a cause that is greater than yourself and you will find the difference in terms of how you feel.
TS: You mentioned that regardless of what your position is in an organization, you can help “raise the consciousness” of another person in their interaction with you. How can people do that? What are some of your ideas about that and what might that look like?
SKR: Let me give you something that happens in many companies. You have people who flutter around the coffee pot and they talk about how terrible things are, how the economy is going down, how the boss is a complete tyrant and nobody pays attention to them, and it’s very possible for you to listen to all of that and get sucked into a downward spiral yourself. Or, as happened to someone who took my program and listened to all of them, he said, “Hey guys, you’re absolutely right. Things are terrible and our boss is sent from the nether regions to make our lives miserable. But let’s just think, is there anything that we could collectively do to make this a better place?” So I understand what just happened. By asking that simple question, and he didn’t do it an accusatory fashion and didn’t say, “You guys are terrible for speaking that way.” He just said, “Is there anything that we can do to make it better?” And that engineered a 180-degree transformation in the way the conversation is going. They actually came up with, “Well, why don’t we try this and see what happens?” And that felt so good that they started meeting weekly to come up, each time, with one single action they could take that can make their life better. And it just spreads from there. That’s something that can be done in virtually any organization.
TS: That’s a wonderful example. The program that you’ve created with Sounds True, Srikumar, is called Personal Mastery: Discovering Passion and Purpose in Your Life and Work. You state in your new book, Happiness at Work and you state in the audio series Personal Mastery: Discovering Passion and Purpose in Your Life and Work, “My vision is that you are so energized by what you do that you find yourself quivering with anticipation at the thought of going to work, that Monday morning is something you look forward to with eagerness, that you derive deep meaning and sustenance from your labor and that this increases with each passing day.”
When I hear that statement, and I’m somebody who actually loves my work, I think, “Well, that is really quite a hyperbole, that quite an exaggerated vision.” Is that really realistic? Quivering with excitement on Monday morning?
SKR: It is a vision, Tami, and it’s a little bit like, let’s say you took up golf and the ideal thing would be to hit a hole in one so you hit a hole-in-one eighty times in a row and that’s the ideal. Now realistically, how many people are going to get there? The point is that even though you know that a hole-in-one is the ideal, if you shoot an eighty, you’re pretty happy about it. So that is the vision that gives you direction to head that way. And as you start heading in that way, you will find that even if you don’t get there, you make enough progress that it has a huge impact on how you feel about what you do and how you feel each day. That’s what I want people to recognize for themselves. I would say that a very large percentage of people who take my program, and I would say an excess of 80 percent of the people, feel a whole lot better about what they do than they did before. Do they actually get there? I don’t know if it’s possible to get there. We are stuck in the human predicament; there will always be things that frustrate us. There are times when we lose our temper, blow steam, feel “why the hell did I get into all of this?” But the amount of time that you spend in such reveries is much less, and overall you snap out of it very fast. And as you go through, if you continue having that vision, you spend less and less time being down and more and more time being up. And it’s certainly true that there are a lot of people who have taken my program who, if they are not quivering with excitement, are certainly not phased by it being Monday morning.
TS: I do think “quivering with excitement,” as I said, sounds extreme to me, but being joyful that it’s Monday morning is possible.
SKR: Absolutely. Not only possible but that’s the way it should be. It’s a pretty miserable life if you get up and say, “Oh my god, it’s Monday morning.” I know. I spent decades in that situation.
TS: And the transformation for you happened…?
SKR: It happened when I started creating this course when all of a sudden it became very important for me to help others not feel dread on Monday morning. And all of sudden, instead of this being a course that I taught, it became a life work. And I’m so passionately interested in it that I can honestly say for me that the difference between work and not work has really vanished.
TS: Yeah. Now what about the person, Srikumar, who is an artist, a creative type of some kind, a dancer, and they think, “There’s just no way that I can support myself through the thing that I am the most passionate about. So I have to have a day job. Monday morning I have to wake up and go to a job and it’s okay, but that’s not really my passion; that’s not really what makes me quiver with excitement. I do it to support myself so I can do the thing that really turns me on.”
SKR: And that’s just fine, Tami, because all of us are complex individuals. There are many different needs and wants that we have. We can be good at many different things. And if some things turn us on more than we adjust so we can do more of whatever it is that turns us on more. That’s just fine. So if you are in such a situation and you want to be a ballet dancer by evening and an accountant by day be grateful to your day job, because that is what permits you to have your evening job. And I don’t think it’s accurate to say that you can only be creative “in a creative job” like dancing, writing, arts. I think you can be creative anywhere. And frankly I do believe that you can be more creative in business than in a lot of the other so-called creative endeavors. You can define “creativity” differently.
TS: What do you mean by that, “creative in business?”
SKR: For example, we had someone who really wanted to be a writer. And he said, “Here I am, stuck in this boring office job and in a company that makes a product that I’m not particularly interested in. And I want to go out and be a writer. It so happened that he found himself in a marketing position and looked at the sales literature that was going out and said, “This is very terrible. Nobody is actually going to pay attention to that.” He started writing copy and the response was great and he said, “Wow, this is something I’m really good at.” And then he started being more creative in his copy. He started being honest. He reflected on his feelings and talked to customers and decided how an actual customer feels and he more than doubled the response rates.
All of a sudden he found that he wanted to be a copywriter and he became a very good one. That took him to a different level of responsibility and pay and also gave him the impetus to write a novel on the side. That’s just one example. No matter what position you’re in, if you look at it not as “This is stifling me and I can’t be creative here” instead of looking upon it as “This is the terrain and what is it that I can do to bring my natural creativity to bear in this situation?” you’ll find that there’s a lot around it.
TS: Now you mention that the person who has a day job that supports them so they can perhaps do some other activity that they really enjoy or they have a day job to support their family and they love their family and that’s really the place that they have the most sense of passion and purpose…that they can be grateful for their day job verses resenting it. How do I do that? How am I grateful for this job that perhaps previously I felt restricted by or resentful toward?
SKR: Here’s something that I get all participants in my group to recognize, Tami: Every time you complain about your job, your work, or anything like that, two things are always true. One, you’re being completely “me-centered.” So, “Poor me. I’m so bright and talented. This is what I really want to do but instead I am stuck in this horrible position, dealing with turkeys all day. Oh, poor me.” The second thing that’s true is that you’re invariably focusing on the two, three, or four things that are wrong with your job or more precisely, the two, three, or four things that you think are wrong with your job and ignoring the many more things that are actually pretty darn good about it.
The particular example that you raise, one of the things that is really good about the job is the person has a job, is getting an income, which permits him or her to look after family, go to movies, put groceries on the table…stuff like that. When you explicitly acknowledge that, then all of a sudden you have a shift in consciousness. Plus, let’s think further. If it’s really so terrible, why are you there at all? Somewhere in the back of your mind, you create a cost-benefit analysis and said, “For these reasons it’s not a bad idea for me to remain in the job.” So acknowledge it consciously. Be grateful for the fact that it’s giving you something, and giving you enough that you don’t walk out tomorrow. Once you start doing that, once you start actively looking for that which is in your job that is actually pretty good, it’s amazing how much you will discover. You’ll find out that there are a couple of people in the company who you really like and enjoy spending time with them. There are some customers that are a delight to interact with. There are occasions when you come alive and you really enjoy what you’re doing.
I have a specific exercise where not only do they identify such things but they also have a temptation to increase that component in their jobs. And if you look at it from that perspective and not the perspective of “here’s what I want and I’m not getting it,” but “Here’s what I really enjoy about it, and what can I do to increase that component in my work?”you’ll find that your job transforms itself and you’ll transform yourself.
TS: You’re saying that…let’s say I really like a certain person or something, I can increase it by taking a walk with them during my break or something like that.
SKR: Absolutely. Or if you say, “Here’s a customer and I really like the customer and the relationship is good,” you could ask, “How do I get more customers like that?” Or “How do I transform all my relationships with customers to be like that?” “What is it that I can do, which is somewhat within my control, to ensure that more of my experiences are like that?”
TS: Now, this very first thing that you said, the very first tip, this “reframing, moving from a me-centered universe to a broader, bigger view” I think is just so profound, Srikumar. What I notice when you say it is how much I’m “me-centered” about what I want, that’s going to make me happy…how I want the company to perform in this way and then I’ll be happy. I’m wondering if you can give our listeners some tips on when we notice that we’re in a “me-centered” place, which I think probably happens to most of us a lot, I mean, “if I’m not looking out for me, who’s going to?” kind of thing
.
SKR: That’s the model that we have, Tami. The model is, “This is a rough world.” We were cultured into a “me-centered” universe at a very young age. We’re taught to be competitive and better than the other person and go out and look out for “number one” and things like that. It’s sort of built into the culture.
By the way, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with being a “me-centered” person. I’m simply pointing out that if you live all of your time in a “me-centered” universe then you are going to find that you live a pretty miserable life. The easiest way to get out of this is to simply recognize how much of the time you are in that. I have several specific exercises, all of which are designed to show that. For example, when you are in a conversation with a person, how often are you not listening to the person because what you are focusing on is the brilliant reply that you’re going to make? So I have an exercise where people are in a conversation but they’re not allowed to use the words, “I,” “me,” or “my.” And straight away, with that as a constraint, they find that they aren’t trying to think about the reply they are going to make but they are actually listening to the other person and the tenor of the interaction changes dramatically.
I have a lot of such exercises to get people to recognize that they are living in a “me-centered” universe and then take small, baby steps to get out of that and those small baby step cumulatively make a tremendous difference. I was talking to a boss, for example, and he was the CEO of a major organization, and he was wondering why he was not very well liked and why people just didn’t seem to do what he wanted them to do. And I pointed out to him that he was in the habit of viewing everyone as a mechanism, even though he felt he was motivating people and being encouraging. In other words, he was saying in a way, “I want to motivate you because if I motivate you, you’re going to do something but you’re going to help me meet my numbers and that’s going to make me look good. So I’m not relating to you as you but I’m relating to you as a mechanism by which something will happen which I want to have happen.” That’s a pretty nasty way to look at it. I was able to get him to recognize that, and he said, “Hey, that’s good.” And he generally got to the point where a lot of the time he was interacting with people not because they could do something that he wanted to have happen but because they could do something that could make them shine and make them feel better about themselves and reach more of their full potential. All of a sudden, the entire nature of his relationship with many of his team members changed and changed dramatically. He felt it and they felt it.
TS: Srikumar, when we were talking about the person who maybe resents their work and doesn’t like it very much and you said, “Find the things that you’re grateful for and then ask yourself how you can amplify that and have more of it.” In other examples, you talk about if you hear a conversation about how terrible our workplace is, you can turn the conversation around and say things like, “Well, what could we do about it? What new initiatives could we put into place?” And what I’ve found is that some people seem to be the kind of people who make that step, that step of asserting themselves and taking initiative and creating something new and other people sort of look on the sidelines at what’s happening and think, “Well it’s not really my job to do that.”
What helps people take initiative, to cross that gap to be the kind of person who says, “Let’s start something new here,” versus just sitting around complaining about it?
SKR: That’s an extremely good question, and I’m not sure I’m going to have a real answer to that one. I do know that the best way to get people thinking along those lines is by having them actually experience it.
Let me give you a situation that kind of touches on the question that you just raised. The first time that I taught the program at one of the top business schools, it was a particular program that was a flagship program with very experienced people who felt, “This is for the birds. It’s wooly and airy-fairy, and it’s not hard business so we’re not going to take it.” But they were curious about it and there were about three or four people from the program who actually took the program and who were constantly being bombarded with questions from others such as, “What is it like? What’s actually happening?” And they of course gave it rave reviews. And the following semester, there were members of the group who had actually graduated and who came back to the business school purely to take that course because they saw the impact that it had on their colleagues and said, “I want to be a part of that.”
When you’re doing something like this, there are going to be a lot of naysayers and people sitting on sidelines. A good percentage of them, once they see the impact it is having, will come back and say, “I really want to do it myself.” There are going to be some, despite all of this, who are going to be cynical and sitting on the sidelines and running it down and those are the people from whom you want to distance yourself.
From an organizational perspective, sooner or later it would be better if those persons were no longer with the company.
TS: Because they’re not really helping move the company forward in a positive way?
SKR: It’s worse than that. If they were no longer with the company, then that’s something you could live with. They are actively dragging it backwards. They are not only being miserable, they are trying to drag others to give them company in misery and I don’t’ think that is good either for them or the other people trying to step out. But I must tell you that when people actually see things like this happening, a very large number of them want to be a part of it. I’m working right now with a major company who heard me speak and they actually wanted to tape my program, but they were hesitant and thought it was a lot of work, that they would have to give up their weekends, and they would just pass on it. But some of them did take it and it just so happened that one of them was a senior HR Executive and she felt that this had completely transformed her life and she wanted to bring it into the company and have her team take it. And then we began to talk about how to bring it into the company on a much larger scale than we had done thus far.
When you see change happening and how much it improves your life, many people want to be on that bandwagon. You just have to make it easy for them.
TS: We talked, Srikumar, about this vision that you have about people coming to work Monday morning and really being excited to come to work. You used the word “quivering” with excitement. You mention that this is the “hole-in-one.” At the same time, in your book, Happiness at Work, you talk about goal setting as not being something that you’re particularly excited about. So I’m a little confused. It’s good to have a vision that is a hole-in-one, but yet, you’re not excited about goal-setting? Can you help me understand this?
SKR: Certainly. I should have been a little bit clearer. I’m not actually against goal-setting. Think about it this way: would you agree that from a very young age we are indoctrinated with the idea that goals are good? You go to school and you get good grades so you can get into a good college. And if you get into a good college, then you will get a good job and then you’ll make a decent salary. Everything is an instrument for something else and if you do something else and all of this, somehow in some way you’ll be happy. Goal-setting and reaching goals are kind of built into our culture, our system in school and work, every place. At work for example, every manager has goals and every employee has to set goals or meet goals set by his or her manager. These days you don’t have goals, you have “stretch goals.”
But here is the point: look back on your own life and you will recognize that actions are within your control but the outcome is completely outside your control. Can you think of times in your life, Tami, when you took a certain set of actions, intending to reach a particular outcome and that didn’t happen?
TS: Of course.
SKR: All the time. Much of the time, actions are within our control and the outcome is not within our control. Much of the time we take actions and much of the time we don’t reach the outcome we wanted. Some of the time what happens is we reach an outcome that is diametrically opposed to what we wanted.
There was a wonderful case where a politician in India wanted to team up the corruption that was in a particular department and since the legal system wasn’t working very well, he thought that he would shame the people, and he publically named the officials who were corrupt. He thought this would straighten them out. But instead, what happened was that all of the population said, “These are the officials who take bribes and we no longer have to think about it” and they started going preferentially to those people and their bribery increased dramatically. So when stuff happens, and if you arrange your life so that you live for the outcome, “if I get this, then I will be happy” and the outcome is something that is beyond your control, you’re setting yourself up to be miserable a great part of the time.
It is possible to live your life differently where you focus on the process, you invest in the process not the end result. A wonderful example of that is a quote by John Wooden, who was the first person to reach the Basketball Hall of Fame both as a player and a coach. He also led UCLA to an unprecedented number of victories and appearances in the FCAA. What he said was, “Every time I start working with a new team, I never talk about winning or outscoring opponents. I always talk about when it’s over, and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If you did the best that you were capable of, then the score doesn’t matter. But if you did the best that you were capable of, I suspect you will find the score to your liking.” It works exactly the same way.
So what I’m saying is that I’m not against goals but I am against goals from the point of view of, “I’m going to invest in the goals and if I make it, then I am happy and successful. But if I don’t make it, then life is terrible.” The way I view it is that goals are very important and you do set them because they give you direction. Once you’ve done that, you stop investing in the goals, which is an outcome, and you start investing in the process and put every fiber of your being in the process. And if you’ve done that and you reach your goals, life is wonderful. And if you’ve done that and you don’t reach that then life is wonderful. And that is a learnable skill.
TS: In a sense what you’re saying is to de-couple happiness from our ability to have hit certain goals; that we can be happy in the process regardless of the outcome. Is that what you’re saying?
SKR: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And if you treat goals from that perspective, then goals are wonderful.
TS: How would you define happiness, Srikumar?
SKR: Once again, in our culture, we tend to speak of happiness in very trivial terms. You know, we’ve got our favorite ice cream so we’re happy. We saw a good movie, so we’re happy. Things like that give you popping flashes of pleasure and that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a very deep sense of well-being: the knowledge that you are fundamentally okay, that you’ve always been okay, that you will always be okay, and that you cannot not be okay. As long as you are in the human predicament, stuff will happen. But even as you do as you must and deal with the stuff that comes your way, you’re still fundamentally okay. That’s what I’m talking about.
TS: I love that definition.
One of the exciting ideas that you introduce in your work (at least I found it really exciting) was the idea of extreme resilience. That it’s possible to be extremely resilient in life at work. I wonder if you could talk about that a bit.
SKR: Sure. Inside I advocate extreme resilience rather than positive thinking. Let me first make a distinction between that. What happens is that we go through life, Tami, and stuff happens to us. We have a habit of instantaneously passing a judgment, which is, “This is a good thing” or “This is a bad thing.” And most of the time when the outcome is something that we did not want and is adverse to our expectations we immediately say that it is a bad fit. Now what happens is that the moment that you define something as a bad thing, the probability that you will experience it as such increases dramatically. But if you look back in your own life, can you think of times and something happened and you thought, “This is terrible,” but with the wisdom of hindsight, you look back on that and say, “Isn’t that wonderful? That led me to all kinds of things that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise and my life is actually better because it happened.” Can you think of things like that in your life?
TS: I can.
SKR: Virtually everybody can. In fact, I used to run an experiment where I physically tabulated it and I would say that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of the people in my program had no difficulty at all in coming up with multiple examples where this is true. They, for example, were rejected in a job interview and felt terrible about it. And then two weeks later, they got a better job offer, which was far better and they wouldn’t have been able to accept it if it had not been for the earlier rejection. Stuff like that.
When you go through life and something happens to you, even something that you initially think is terrible, if you look at it from an enlightened perspective and say, “Maybe it’s a good thing or maybe it’s a bad thing. But since I don’t know, I’m not going to stick the ‘bad thing’ label on it.” And if you don’t put that label on it, you don’t get down. You simply look at it as part of the terrain. Then you don’t need positive thinking. Positive thinking, by its very nature, brings about a duality. You need positive thinking because something negative has happened to you and you somehow need to turn it around and make some lemonade out of it. But if you don’t stick the “bad thing” label on whatever happens to you, then you don’t need positive thinking and you don’t spend any time being down and you simply go on and do what needs to be done.
Imagine that you are a civil engineer and you are looking to build a road. When you’re looking at building a road through territory and you see a swamp there, a swamp is not a bad thing. It’s simply something that you have to dig around in your blueprint for the road. You can approach life that way. And when stuff happens, don’t bother labeling it as a “bad thing.” Simply learn what lessons you can learn from that and say, “Okay, where do we go from here?” That takes you out of going into a negative spiral. You no longer lament on the terrible things that happened and why it happened to you.
TS: Do you believe that that is universally true, Srikumar, that anything that happens, no matter what happens, that we don’t need to label it as bad? As I’m thinking about it, lots of things that happen to me in business that I think are bad, you know a big store account goes bankrupt and owed us a certain amount of money, somebody sues me for no reason, a big order is returned, there’s a cancellation….I mean, these things I do think are bad when they happen. That is my response.
SKR: Here’s the thing: you can say that they are bad and you can go into a downward spiral about it, or you can simply say, “It happened. And what is the lesson that I can learn from it.” Having learned what you can from it, you move on from it and you don’t waste any more emotional energy on that.
Let me give you an example. Victor Franco, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, related the tale of this really beautiful girl who was very wealthy and she was in a concentration camp. In one of the conversations, she related that she was really happy that this happened to her because she said that she was a spoiled brat and she now recognized that she was a spoiled brat and this experience brought her in touch with the spiritual side of her that she never knew existed. And she was genuinely grateful that she was in a concentration camp and a few weeks later she was taken and gassed and she was never seen again. But that is what started Victor Franco on his life work, which is, when faced with extreme adversity, why is it that some people simply flourish while others disintegrate?
The point is that you don’t have much control over what life deals you, but you do have an enormous amount of control over how you choose to experience what life deals you. And I also think that if you have, you know, bad accounts or a very big account turning bad on you, or somebody suing you frivolously, you can spend an enormous amount of energy saying “This is a bad thing and why did it have to happen to me?” or you can simply say, “Okay, this happened. What is it that I have to learn in terms of procedures that I’m going to implement or steps that I’m going to take in the future?” and then focus on what you have to do right now, rather than lamenting on what happened. Agree that this isn’t what you would have chosen if you had the ability to choose, but since you don’t have that ability, you simply have to deal with it rather than lament over it.
TS: I love this thought, at least theoretically. I hope I can start applying it more. And that brings me to the question of how does this work for you in your own life? Are you able to have all kinds of things happen and not label them as “bad things”?
SKR: Oh, absolutely.
TS: It works? Your book contract got canceled or this speaking event?
SKR: Wonderful! Let me give you a concrete example. I was teaching at a very prominent business school and there were some people who were upset about my course and all of a sudden they managed to get it canceled. So in a particular semester when I was supposed to be teaching there, I received word literally at the last minute that no, I’m not going to be teaching there. Now if I had been my old self, I would have been really, really down about it and angry and contemplated legal action and really gone through the entire gamut of negative emotions. This time, it literally took me somewhere between five to ten minutes to say, “This stuff happens,” and I moved on. Now because I was not teaching at that business school in the fall, I was given the opportunity to be a keynote speaker at an organization called World Glue, which is an organization that sponsors democracy in the workplace. My talk was extremely well-received and I basically made contact with a bunch of people, all who now play a very prominent role in my life. One of them in particular liked what I had to say so much that he invited me to come and speak at his conference on happiness in Copenhagen. And I did. That talk, yesterday, made it to the main homepage of Ted. Now I’m on Ted.com. And none of this would have happened had I been teaching at that business school at that time.
TS: That’s a perfect illustration.
SKR: Why go around saying, “This is bad,” because who knows?
TS: In your work, Srikumar, I know that you talk to a lot of successful executives and business leaders. Do you think these people have, in general, mastered this technique of extreme resilience?
SKR: By and large, no. That’s one of the reasons that I’m very excited to be doing what I am because these are intelligent people and a certain percentage of them, when the concept is presented to them in the way in which I present it, are very eager to say “This makes sense and want to do more about it. How do I go about doing it?” But by and large, if the question that you’re asking is, “Have they mastered it?” Then, no way! They live extremely stressful lives. There’s a lot of tension. They do things on a whim and at the spur of the moment and by and large are many times quite miserable.
TS: As you talking and I’m listening to this skill of not labeling things as bad and how much energy that will free up to be constructive and to do what’s needed, I’m thinking that all of these successful business people, they are already successful. If they did this, they would be even more successful.
SKR: Absolutely. That is correct and that is where my work is now headache.
TS: And successful in terms of results but also probably successful in terms of the quality of their experience.
SKR: Bingo! You put your finger right on it, Tami. And let me add further, it’s not just successful in terms of results, not just successful in terms of the kind of people that they are, but also when you’re operating from that space, the other people that they interact with get a whole lot better too.
Can I share a story with you?
TS: Please.
SKR: I had someone who is a senior executive at a large firm and one of the things he positively hated was delivering the results of 360 degree evaluations and especially when they were negative, because this meant that the other person would be let go. And somewhere during the time when he was taking my program he said, “I’m approaching this the wrong way. All I’m thinking about is that I hate doing this and why do I have to do this; this is such a waste of time. Why is this a part of my work day? I’m being entirely “me-centered.” Why don’t I get out of that and simply recognize that I’m a highly compensated individual and this is part of what I have to do, so that is the way life is. So let me accept it and start thinking instead in terms of what the impact is going to be on the other person.”
So the next time certain situations came around, he sat down and meditated for a couple of minutes before the meeting. Then he met with the person and pretty much laid it on the line. He said, “Here’s your evaluation. This is what it shows. This is what is good about it. This is what I don’t agree with but there is nothing I can do about it so let’s not even talk about it. It’s not good. And if I don’t see these things happen, within two months, you will probably be let go.” And then he said, “Where are you? How are you feeling? What impact is this going to have on you? What impact is it going to have with your family and what can I do to help you?
And the subordinate burst up crying. He said, “In all the years that I’ve been in the workplace, no one has ever been so sympathetic. Thank you so much. Can I meet with you every two weeks?” And he said “Sure.” They started meeting every two weeks; he’s no longer with the company but his former subordinate is there and it’s going well. As he spoke to me afterward and he was reflecting, he said “You know, Professor Rao, there is nothing that I said that I would not normally have said anyway. But the space from which I said it was vastly different.” That’s what makes all the difference.
When you’re dealing with people, most of the time what happens is that we’re dealing with people on the basis of roles. “He’s my subordinate. He’s my boss. He’s my colleague. He’s an important customer so I better be nice to him.” We deal with people because of the roles that they are playing and we’re playing a role ourselves. And I’m encouraging people not to relate to other people as their roles that they are playing. Relate to them from one human being to another. And when you relate to people at that fundamental level as one human being to another, they are no longer thinking, “He is my boss. He is my subordinate.” We are simply saying, “Here is that person. We are stuck in a human predicament. What can I do to be of service?” When you’re approaching it from that emotional space, it really changes the dynamic of the interaction.
And there is no way to actually describe this so people will understand, so I don’t even try. I have an exercise which forces them to go out and do it. And when they have that experience, then they know what I’m talking about. Trust me. It’s extremely powerful.
TS: Can you explain the exercise to me?
SKR: Sure! There’s a whole bunch of them but let me give you one:
What they have to do in this exercise is whenever they run into another person they simply have to beam appreciation and goodwill and recognize that this is a human being who is stuck in his or her predicament and I silently wish that person every blessing under the sun. And they do it with casual encounters, like the cab driver, the person you buy a newspaper from, your waitress, the checkout cashier, as well as with the important relationships like your colleague, members of your work team or whatever. You silently simply say, “I wish you every blessing under the sun and what can I do to be of service?” That is the framework from which they enter it.
Many have reported huge, dramatic changes in the nature of the interaction, the depth of the conversation and the closeness of the bonds they have forged. I’m seeing right now in one of the programs that I’m conducting where someone told me that she had a problem with a subordinate and all of a sudden it has become a very functional relationship.
TS: As you talk about that and how we can treat each other, it makes me think that Happiness at Work, which is of course the title of your new book, and happiness in life are really not that different.
SKR: That is exactly correct.
TS: And that, in and of itself, is a novel idea for people.
SKR: Yes. You put your finger right on it.
I have an exercise that I call “The Ideal Job Exercise” and it’s called that because when I was teaching in business schools, jobs are okay. But many of the people in my programs figured out, “Professor Rao, you’re really not taking about an ideal job. You’re talking about an ideal life.” They are right. That is what I am talking about.
TS: Can you introduce us briefly to what the ideal job/ ideal life exercise is?
SKR: Sure. What happens is that I have people sit down and talk in and write out in graphic details their vision of what the “ideal job” looks like. Most of the time, people start off and I frequently get people say, “Professor Rao, the vision laid out is a wonderful vision but my problem is . . . I don’t feel passionate about anything.” And then I say, “What is your ideal job?” And they say, “Here it is. This is the city that I live in and this is how much money I’m making and this is the type of person my boss is and these are the type of people my colleagues are and here’s how much I travel.” Stuff like that. And they say that if they could have that then they would be happy, ecstatic, whatever. And I point out to them that that isn’t true. First of all, the exact set of circumstances that they laid out doesn’t exist. And even if it did and they were plugged into it, it would probably take only a few weeks before they were just as unhappy or miserable there than they presently are, because passionate doesn’t exist in the job, it exists in you. And if you don’t have a way of igniting it within yourself, where you are, you’re very unlikely to find it outside. Once they have that realization, most of them get there pretty fast.
TS: Okay but hold on, I’m not sure I get that. What do you mean, “Passion doesn’t exist outside of yourself”?
SKR: In other words, when you say, “I really want to feel passionate about my job,” you’re looking at it from the perspective of “Here is the stuff about the job that needs to change before I can be passionate.” And I’m saying, “Here is the stuff about you that needs to change and once you start making the changes, internally between your ears, you will find that the external stuff also starts changing automatically and with much less effort.
TS: Because I’m approaching people differently?
SKR: You’re approaching everything differently. You’re approaching your tasks differently, the people differently, therefore they respond to you differently. And you’re experience of what you’re doing is dramatically different.
In an ideal job exercise, it’s a creative exercise where they do it a number of times and what I point out is that your ideal job isn’t something that you find; it’s something that you create. And you do it in bits and pieces and start putting it together. It’s a little bit like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And assembling it isn’t a matter of days or weeks, it’s a matter of years and decades. Once you start becoming clear about what it is that you want to do, that what it is is a contribution that you would like to make. You start bringing those pieces into play. It’s not that you discover your ideal job. It is one day you wake up and find that you are in your ideal job.
TS: And you’re saying that that also applies to the life that we have, the whole of our life?
SKR: Absolutely!
TS: It sounds like that you think that the kinds of techniques that we apply to work and life are really the same?
SKR: Very, very, very much the same. And in fact, also, I’d like to point out that in my book, you do not have a work life and a home life. I’ve had a lot of people talk to me along the lines, “Well you know – my home life is a mess. My wife is suing for divorce. My kids don’t want to hang out with me. Even my dog barks when I get home at night. And even my mistress is having an affair. But I’m doing great at work.” It doesn’t work that way, Tami. You have one life. You don’t have a work life and a home life. You have one life and either it is working or it’s not. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have challenges and some of them more extreme in one or more areas of your life.
TS: Very good. That makes sense to me.
One final question, Srikumar: our program is called, Insights at the Edge. You’ve talked about being grateful, not taking things as bad news, not living in a “me-centered” universe. And I’m curious, what is the “edge” for you in terms of applying these principles in your life? Where are you still growing in applying your own realizations in your own life?
SKR: Well, let me share a couple of things with you, Tami. Twenty years ago, I was pretty miserable doing what I was doing. I was surrounded by people I didn’t want to have anything to do with. I was deeply disgruntled and feeling, “I have a PhD from Columbia. I have these wonderful credentials and I’m stuck in an area where nobody recognizes it. And I’m far behind what my peers are doing.” I was feeling pretty miserable and sorry for myself. And now I can get up and sincerely state that the difference between work and not work has completely vanished. I did a physical count a few months ago and found that well over 90 percent of the people who have an ongoing presence in my life are people I want to have in my life, as opposed to, “Why is this turkey in my life?”
I get up and look at what I do and I can tell you that I am never going to retire. This is what I’m going to do and I’m going to continue doing it as long as I am physically capable of doing it and then more. There is going to be a time when I can no longer jump on an airplane and go ten times a month away. But there are wonderful people who have told me, “Professor Rao, there is such a thing as the Web 2.0 and all sorts of things that we can do with technology. Let us help you see how we can modularize what you do and put it out to a much broader audience.” I’m happily working with them. Beautiful things are happening almost on a daily basis.
When I look upon my life now as compared to what it was like twenty years ago, there’s just no comparison. And I can see that this is happening in a better way. More people are coming into my life who have more talents that they want to use to liberate what I can do. It’s just a beautiful marriage in many ways. Does that answer your question?
TS: It does. So, using your language, you feel successful?
SKR: I no longer think in terms of success. I simply think in terms of, “Am I doing what it is that I was put on Earth to do?” And the answer is, “More and more so each day.”
TS: Wonderful.
I’ve been talking with Dr. Srikumar Rao, here on Insights at the Edge. He’s the author of a new book called, Happiness at Work: Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful, No Matter What. and also a Sounds True audio learning series, The Personal Mastery Program: Discovering Passion and Purpose in Your Life and Work.
Thank you, Srikumar, for being with us.
SKR: My pleasure, Tami. I’ve admired Sounds True for a long time. I love your programs. I know many of the authors and creators of your programs and I think you’re doing something wonderful in the world, and I wish you every power.
TS: Thank you so much. Thanks for being with us.
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