Professional Setbacks Happen to All of Us. Here Are Some Lessons From Resetting My Career. | Dan Harris & Toni Magyar

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hello, gang. Okay. I have a lot to say in the introduction to this episode. This is a personal episode today, but don't worry. It's also very practical. You're going to hear me talk about But what I learned about issues such as focus, feedback, the disutility of shame or self-criticism, and the value of expecting adversity, even though we all want life to be an unbroken upward trajectory of seamless progress. These are all things that I learned or perhaps more accurately relearned when I was forced to reset or restart or resuscitate my career last year. Just let me step back for a second and give you some context.

0:57Last year at around this time, I went public and announced that I was separating from the meditation app that I co-founded. That separation process was among the most difficult things that I have experienced as a grownup. It lasted three years. It brought up all sorts of issues for me, including anger and anxiety and more. And yes, I will fully acknowledge the fact that having a business divorce was one of the most difficult things in my life is proof that my life has been charmed and privileged. I own that. And yet it was really hard. The end result was that I left the app that I had long considered to be my baby and restarted a new subscription service over on Substack called DanHarris.com.

1:36A huge thank you to all of you who signed up for that thing. In the last year, we've accumulated more than 200 ,000 followers, many, many thousands of whom are actually paying, which allows me to pay my staff and pay all the meditation teachers who contribute content. So I'm immensely grateful. And I should add that I'm grateful not only to all of you, but also to the incredible people who work on my team, one of whom you're going to hear from today. This episode is a conversation between me and Tony Magyar, who is the CEO of my little company. I don't think she's ever been on the podcast before, so this should be a treat.

2:11She is an incredibly smart, very, very thoughtful person who not only leads our team with a lot of care, but also has the very big and sometimes very annoying job of keeping me in line, which she does beautifully. Tony has a rich background in the media space. She started in traditional book publishing and then moved over to podcasts and now works with me. So this is going to be a behind the scenes conversation where we talk in a very, very candid way about the hard lessons that we have both learned in the year since we launched. It's going to have plenty of behind the scenes content if you're into that kind of thing.

2:45But we also made damn sure to center it around the practical things that both Tony and I learned over the past year or so. And of course, practical, operational, actionable wisdom is at the spirit of our entire endeavor. So that just kind of makes sense. I should also say this is the kickoff episode for a whole month of programming we're doing during the month of September. September is a back to school month. It's a time when people reset often. Sometimes in my business, we call it like a mini New Year's. So we have a whole month of programming around the theme of reset. We're coming out of summer, we're getting back to our routines, so we're resetting here on the pod.

3:25Coming up this month, we've got episodes on how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your career, and more. I told you this intro was going to be long. I'm almost done, but I've got a couple of other announcements before we dive into the conversation. First, we're doing some resetting, to be a little cute, over at danharris.com. Over the last year, we've learned a lot about what our customers want, so we are now offering bespoke, guided meditation. meditations that come with all of our Monday and Wednesday episodes. Every month, we hire a teacher of the month who produces these custom guided meditations.

3:57The idea is that, you know, we can help you take all the cool stuff you learn in the episode and pound it into your neurons through guided meditations. This month, our teacher of the month is Vinny Ferraro, a fan favorite and a personal favorite of mine. Second thing to say, and this is related, starting September 2nd, we're going to start doing live guided meditation and Q &A sessions every week. This is only for paid subscribers. By the way, the guided meditations are also only for paid subscribers. For the last year, we've done these live video meditation and Q &A sessions once or twice a month.

4:31They're super popular and I also really enjoy doing them. So now we're going to do it every week, every Tuesday, in fact. So you can put it on your calendar and you can count on it. Our first one is September 2nd, four o 'clock Eastern. It'll be me and Vinny together. And then after September 2nd, indefinitely, every Tuesday, four o 'clock Eastern, we'll do some meditation together. And if you miss it, you can always do it asynchronously on your own time. We'll send out the video. Long way of saying we've got a lot of cool shit going on over at danharris.com. Please sign up as a paying subscriber.

5:01As you will hear in this conversation with Tony, these new features, you know, the bespoke guided meditations and the weekly live video meditations. They're really just the beginning. We have some pretty ambitious plans. We'd love to have you in on the ground floor as we build this thing together. Okay, one last thing. I promise this is the last thing. This one last announcement that we'll take a break and get to the actual episode. If you want to meditate with me in person, I am doing a live IRL event at the Omega Institute, which is an hour or two north of New York City at the end of October, the weekend of the 24th.

5:34It's a weekend-long event with my friends, Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren. We call it Meditation Party because it's a mixture of meditation and also hanging out, socializing, community, et cetera. You can sign up at eomega.org, eomega.org. I'll also put a link in the show notes. Okay, quick break, and then we'll be right back with my conversation with the estimable Tony Magyar. Hey, it's Dan. I just want to tell you about something I'm really proud of, the new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish.

6:14It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind. That makes you happier and less reactive. Because you're steadier, that improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier, then your relationships get even better and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers like Seben A.

6:53Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. If you eat well, stay active and still wake up exhausted every morning, the missing piece may not be your effort. It could be your sleep. Sleep sets the stage for the rest of your day. It's the time when your body quietly goes to work to heal your mind and your body, steady your mood and generally restore your energy so you can show up at work, home and throughout life rested and ready.

7:34When sleep suffers, everything else can too. As I often say, sleep is the apex predator of healthy habits. If you have noticed changes in your sleep, struggle with snoring or feeling tired, no matter how much rest you get, Sleep Doctor can help. Starting with a clinical grade home sleep study, sleep doctor can help you understand what's happening while you sleep and uncover the root cause of your fatigue. I have personally actually had one of these home sleep studies, which is so much better, in my opinion, than going to a sleep lab where you're just hooked up to wires all night and not in your own bed, and maybe you won't even sleep.

8:11I did one of these sleep studies at home. I got a full night's sleep and then got a ton of great feedback as a result. And you can too, via Sleep Doctor. You get clear answers, expert guidance, and practical next steps toward better sleep. Visit sleepdoctor.com to take the first step by waking up rested and ready, now accepting most insurance.

8:35You good to go? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So I'll just start. I'll just kick it off. Yeah. Okay. Tony Maggier, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. First time appearance. First time. Maybe the last. We'll see. What should we talk about? Well, we're going to talk about what we've been up to for the last year and where that has led us and where we think we're going. Yeah. So September 10th last year, we published an episode on the show. It was just you. No guest. And you told the audience about a career earthquake that you'd just been through and a bunch of things that you learned. But that earthquake was you were leaving the meditation app that you had co-founded.

9:31And you were going out on your own, starting a new business, a little team. And that was a year ago. So we have done a lot and we have learned a lot. So we're going to share what's been going on behind the scenes a little bit. And then we're going to talk about what have we learned about starting a business? What have we learned about what we should be offering to our listeners and our subscribers at danharris.com? and then what have we learned about change? You've been through a lot. I mean, it's not just me. It's not just you. Yeah, me too. You know, because this whole month on the podcast, we're talking about resets, nervous system, career, relationships.

10:26So we want to kick off and acknowledge that like change is happening all of the time. But for human beings, that can be really hard. So we're going to use some very big changes that we've been through to kind of help tease out some lessons to foreground for this whole month of programming. So just to put a fine point on it for the listeners, so that we'll start by talking about practical takeaways from a year plus of programming. tumult in our professional and personal lives with the goal of giving people something they can do in their own lives. And then toward the end, we'll pull back the curtain a little bit, do some behind the scenes stuff on what we're thinking about and building towards as a company.

11:18Am I summing that up correctly? I think that's pretty much right. Okay. Pretty much right. Pretty much right. I was thinking we would actually start by giving the audience a little more background and context. We're not here to spill tea or talk about the breakup. But I think when you are in the midst of this very long, painful separation process, your career and livelihood was really up in the air. One of the potential titles we've talked about for this episode is how to reset after you blow up your life. And we're not suggesting the audience should blow up their life, but I think it is helpful context, perhaps just to understand where we were and what we were doing to understand, you know, where we are now and how to deal with just the uncertainty of change.

12:15So the order of operations then is little background, little background, practical takeaways. is what are we offering behind the scenes what are we offering yes yeah and uh maybe we'll let you run free a little bit and talk about some future ideas that we have we'll see how that goes just to frame that for the audience when she talks about maybe letting me run free one of the hardest parts of tony's job when we'll get into this is um she's working with somebody who chases a lot of squirrels some of you may have heard have heard me talk about this before but in that movie Up, which I've watched with my son many, many times.

12:53It's a Pixar movie. The bad guy has a pack of dogs who chase the good guys. And every once in a while, the dogs get distracted and yell the word squirrel and go off chasing a squirrel. And I do that a lot. I've got a million ideas, some of them good, some of them very, very stupid. And they're all squirrels. And we have to decide, and Tony often has to play traffic cop on this, which squirrels are we going to chase and how do we stay focused? Is that the correct context to your dry comment earlier? Yes, exactly. Okay, so your whole career, your livelihood was pretty up in the air. And there were a few reasons for that.

13:34You had left ABC News after 20-some on your career. And you did that to focus really on 10 % Happier and the work that you do around meditation and mental health. But I think it was not long after you had made that decision that there started to be some conflict at the old app company. Started heading down the path of, you know, having to separate. At the same time, the podcast industry was sort of like going through like convulsions of several kinds. Great shows were being canceled left and right. People were losing their jobs. We had a couple contracts that were making it just difficult for us to know what our future was going to look like.

14:30were we going to be able to afford to make this show? What was that going to look like? And we knew it was going to take us some time to figure that out, given the agreements we had in place and just the timing. The word we often used was existential. Things felt really challenging. And for reasons we're not going to go into, We ended up needing to announce your departure from the meditation app a bit sooner than we had anticipated. And we wanted to give the audience a place where they could follow you going forward. and we wanted to offer things that we hadn't offered in the past. More connection to you, more help remembering, lessons to the show, but we also had to do it really quickly.

15:28And I'm curious just to hear from you when we got to launch day and there was a queue of things that needed to happen. A press release needed to go out from the company and then we could publish our episode. we could launch danharris.com. Do you remember how you were feeling that day? You seemed super chill. I was like a mess. You had seen me in the previous three years be anything but chill. It's not like I was perpetually relaxed. And there were plenty of times that you witnessed firsthand where I really, I don't think handled it well. It was like the manifestation of my deepest fears, as I've often talked about with you.

16:17And on this show, you know, I have a great grandfather who took his own life in the family kitchen after losing the family fortune and getting indicted. And I just have that kind of primordial for me, primordial fear in my bones. And so this kind of had echoes of that. And so I was really, really anxious for a long time. Plus there was, you know, So it was a long process of separating from the company. That was a long negotiation. And you were right there for every step of it. And of course, we were negotiating to figure out how much money we're going to make on the podcast. And so, as you said, it felt existential.

16:54I think for a lot of that period, I was just on tilt. By the time we got to September 10th of last year, when we announced that I was leaving Yap and that you and I and the rest of this team had decided to strike out on our own. I actually felt reasonably good. One of the things I learned is how to live with uncertainty. There's a story that I was just thinking about this morning that my executive coach, who you know well, Jerry Colonna, who the audience may remember, he's been on the show a bunch of times. He has a story of talking to his shrink several decades ago and just being really worried about money and feeling unsafe.

17:39And the shrink asked him, how much money would make you feel safe? And Jerry heard himself say, Bill Gates money, which, you know, is of course, totally ridiculous. I mean, very few people other than Bill Gates ever get Bill Gates money. But it speaks to me of how we're never going to feel solid. We're never going to feel, we can't get there, that we're chasing something that's a mirage, an illusion. And I have to learn this lesson over and over again, because I, you know, you and I talk about my desire to turn the volume down on a sense of precarity in my life. But actually, I think in my saner moments, I recognize that you can't get rid of groundlessness.

18:23That is the fundamental truth. And those moments of feeling secure, that's actually really more the illusion. And I hate this fact about reality, but it does seem kind of non-negotiable. And so I think over time, I've just gotten better at learning how to live with it. I heard an expression recently, expect nothing, be prepared for anything. And I kind of like that. You and I talk a lot about something a guest on the show once said, is like life is not an escalator. So I will not expect a smooth upward trajectory for our company for anything in my life. And I will simultaneously be prepared for anything.

19:05This is not like a recipe I don't think properly understood as being hypervigilant and constantly anxious. It's just the only ground that is available is the confidence that I've trained my mind enough and have a good enough team around me personally and professionally to handle whatever shit show might emerge. And it will. Yes. Shit shows will happen. Yes. On the regular. How do you handle? I mean, I talked a little bit about just kind of how I handle it. One is just recognizing the truth of it. And two is self-soothing by just talking to myself and talking with you. So as I'm talking, I'm realizing there are a bunch of things that were said there.

19:49One is seeing clearly in Buddhist speak, Sampajana, I believe it's called, just seeing clearly that groundlessness is the truth. That's one kind of healing modality because you're not arguing with reality. The second is recognizing that talking to yourself, talking to myself about the fact that I can handle whatever comes up. Like I'm scared of it, but I can deal with it. And I just look back at my history and realize I've dealt with lots of stuff. The third is have good people around you. Another expression you and I use all the time, never worry alone. Those are three practical, actionable tools for the audience.

20:27What would you add to that? Like, what do you use to get through all of this topsy-turvy stuff?

20:37I would sort of add something we were talking about right before we started recording, and I alluded to it a second ago is just that change is constant. This thing that you're worried about right now, this feeling that you're having right now, it's about to change. It's not always going to change for the better, but it is going to change. And then I think the other piece of this that you know is something that I've been working on very gradually is just the self-compassion piece. Because for me, and I know I'm not alone here, I tend to over-index on shame and self-blame anytime it seems like something isn't going well.

21:29And so sometimes it's a reminder of being imperfect, being human, needing to make mistakes to learn. And other times, and we've talked about this in terms of decisions and choices we've made together, it's about knowing we did the best we could with the information we had at the time.

21:56the circumstances the media landscape whatever may have changed and we may regret our decision but we did the best we could with the information we had at the time and there were a lot of factors that weren't you know necessarily in our control it's really helpful actually because the the shame and the guilt and the self-blame and the self-laceration does not help your business absolutely not the more i fixate on what i think my failings have been, the harder I might try to push myself to deny them, overcome them, change immediately, which isn't going to happen, even if it's unintentional, then the harder I'm going to push on other people, right?

22:55That thing of the thing we don't want to see in ourselves that we haven't accepted, haven't integrated, it bleeds out into our relationships with other people. So needing to slow down, have more compassion, be a little bit gentler, and not be a neurotic drill sergeant is so critical because if I'm doing it to myself, it will have repercussions, not just for me, but for the rest of the team and our whole business. I think what you're talking about here is kind of the punchline for my next book, which I was just writing a chat. I was writing the key chapter where I realized this this morning, which is, I believe what you were just talking about, which is that we have two spirals available to us at all times.

23:53One is what you were just describing, which my friend Evelyn Triboli describes as the toilet vortex, where you're hard on yourself, and then you take that on other people, and then you feel like shit, and then you're even worse to other people, and then you feel even worse, and then down you go. And the other, which I think can often kick off with self-compassion is as you uh learn how to take care of your own mind well then your relationships improve because you're easier on other people and because relationships are the most important variable in human flourishing then your inner weather gets even bombier then the relationships improve even more and then up you go i call that the cheesy upward spiral and people think of business i think often as a um I don't know, purely commercial outside the realm of the spiritual, for lack of a better word.

24:49But actually, it's a great crucible for practicing all the stuff we talk about on the show. Absolutely. Absolutely. But over the last couple of years, when I've taken on too much or felt like I made a mistake that was somehow unforgivable and wanted to quit or fire myself, It is true that actually your book in progress and manuscript, as funky as it is right now, as you toil away on your rewrite, has been hugely helpful. And it's one of the things that really motivates me to keep going, keep building this business, because I know the work that you're doing and that we're all doing really can change people's lives.

25:48And that's a big deal. I would like to finish this book. It has been a tough slog. But just to put a little meat on the bone of what you're saying there, that when you say you're excited about it, one of your areas of expertise really is the business of creating content that will help people. You came up through publishing and then you went to podcasts. Then you worked in a company that mixed podcasts with a meditation app. And now you're the CEO of a company that's really, really focused on that. and your vision, which I really share, is the book comes out, it hopefully inspires a bunch of people to do the things that I did in the book and then we then create an infrastructure of courses where people can learn how to do the things that you can watch me fuck up in the book.

26:34So it's kind of like you go to a movie and then you go to the theme park afterwards and we are building the theme park. We're building both at the same time And that's what you're from a professional standpoint. That's where you really feel most energized. Yeah, super excited. And I think we can use that as a segue to like, what is this theme park? I do want to just go back to something you said that I think is a key learning that we should dwell on. Are you OK with that? So before I was listing at least three things I learned in the aftermath and also in the prodrome of blowing up my whole life.

27:13One is, you know, the value of mindfulness, like seeing clearly what reality is so that I'm not at war with it. And after a while, you start to surrender into it, relax. Like, yeah, I can see we're in a world of ceaseless change. That doesn't mean I don't have any agency. It doesn't mean I'm going to be resigned. but it means I can learn how to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly. Mindfulness can be trained through mindfulness meditation. The second part, I described it as developing a sense of confidence that you can handle whatever's going to come your way, but I actually think the bigger framing for the second thing would be self-compassion.