Stressed, Stuck, and Overthinking? Here's the Science of Moving Forward | Ranjay Gulati

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

0:18Hello, everybody. How we doing? Okay, so we've all been there. Those moments of uncertainty and fear where we freeze, we feel paralyzed, we overanalyze, we overthink, and then as a consequence, we fail to take action in ways that can later produce a lot of shame and regret. I suspect this situation I'm describing right here is increasingly common right now when anxiety and uncertainty are through the roof. We're dealing with so many X factors in the world right now. AI, war, political polarization, I could go on. So in this context, in a world that is more uncertain perhaps than ever, that leaks into our daily lives in all sorts of conscious and subconscious ways, in this context, how do you give yourself the resources to get out of paralysis and into action?

1:11In other words, how do you develop, and I'm going to use a loaded word here, courage. You may be tempted to think of courage as an inalterable factory setting, but my guest today argues that it's actually a skill, which is right on point with the major theme of this show, that happiness and all the states of mind we want are, in fact, skills. And my guest is going to lay out a bunch of very practical ways to develop the skill of courage, ways that are doable for any of us, even if we might think of ourselves as fundamentally fearful, even cowardly. I'm looking at myself here. Not for nothing said guest actually has a good semi-defensive cowardice, or at least an explanation that made me feel a little bit better.

1:56My guest is Runjay Gulati. He's a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of a book called How to Be Bold. We talk about the difference between being courageous and being reckless, how to accept your fears without being controlled by them, tools for remaining calm in the face of disaster, how to find your moral anchors. I'll let him explain what that means. The importance of having a support squad, how to inculcate courage into your family, your workplace and your friend group, and much more. By the way, and bear with me for this segue here, it is very hard to be courageous if you haven't slept.

2:32Over on the 10 % app, we are now going big on sleep. In my experience, sleep is one of the most popular use cases for meditation apps. So starting next week, we're going to be adding 10 new sleep meditations to the library over on the app. And we're going to be doing a live session on video with our teacher of the month, Kara Lai, who's going to talk about how best to use meditation for sleep. You can become a member by signing up over at danharris.com. Just real quick here, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got an event coming up in New York City at the 92nd Street Y on May 17th There's a link in the show notes if you want to get tickets Okay, we'll get started with Ron J.

3:13Gulati right after this 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. It'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.

3:48That 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 Sabine Selassie 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.

4:22Head 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. Have you ever invested in something that seemed incredible at first, but did not live up to the hype? That happened to be back in the 90s when I invested in the company that made the Palm Pilot. People of a certain age will remember those. They were like kind of the precursor to the smartphone, but they were not that smart and not connected to the internet. Anyway, lost a little money on that. If you're a marketer, you definitely know this feeling. Marketers optimize for the numbers that look great.

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5:44Ron Jay Gulati, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan. Pleasure to be here with you today. Pleasure to have you here. Well, let me start with an obvious question. Why are you so interested in the subject of courage? First, you don't know what you're studying and why. It's what we call retrospective sensemaking. You look back and say, oh, now why did I do that? What was I thinking? How did I end up here? And this is one of those projects where if you ask me five years ago, Ranjay, you're going to write a book about courage, I'd say you're crazy. I mean, why would I want to write a book about that?

6:16But now that I look back, in hindsight, it makes sense. My mother was an entrepreneur. My father was a military officer. So I have parents who were exemplifying courage in their own very distinct ways. One was physical courage in the armed forces in combat. My mother as an entrepreneur. And then, you know, some of my own experiences as well that I had, I came to realize that courage is a universal currency. We all kind of admire it, but we don't really know what it is. And I have some moments of embarrassment too. Honestly, I think I studied it for myself. I never thought I'd write the book even.

6:54I was really wanting to know more about it out of my own curiosity. Maybe I can become more courageous, not too late. When you say you have your own moments of embarrassment, what do you mean? One of the moments I talk about in the book was when I was 14 years old. my mother had by now built a very successful fashion business working with a couple of fashion houses in paris and she achieved kind of her dream which was to buy a piece of land where she was going to build her own home she hadn't until now had a home it was a beautiful piece of land that she found and then a developer decided he wanted it and started chasing her for the land i was home from boarding school one son weekend and the guard from her gate came said there's a gentleman on the door insisting on seeing your mom can you talk to him so i went to the gate he was from the developer big burly fellow and he said man i want to see your mother i said no she's not going to see you so don't waste your time he said no tell her last time it will bother her five minutes we'll never bother her again so i went to my mom she says okay five minutes bring him in and she told me she said you stand at that door and make sure he's out of here in five minutes so i bring him into the living room he sits down opposite her on the sofa i'm at the door very immediately he takes out a checkbook with a blank signed check and a piece of paper.

8:08He says, ma 'am, we're not here to negotiate. We'll give you whatever you want. The mother immediately pushes back, says, it's not about the money. I don't care about money. I'm not selling this land. It's really not about the money. Immediately, he gets belligerent and says, I am going to make you sign this today. So I was shocked. My mother was shocked. She says, excuse me, please leave now. So he then leans back and he pulls back his blazer like I am and he had a gun tucked in his waist. Now I am at the door. I'm 14 years old, pretty big kid by then, but I'm like confused. I'm thinking should I call the guard?

8:48Should I jump him? Maybe he's bluffing. Can I take him on? My mother, my sister, what am I going to do? My mother, five foot one inches tall, without hesitation, leaps out of her sofa seat, walks across the table and slaps him across the face. He didn't even see it coming. And she said, how dare you come into my house? And first you try to bully me. And now you threaten me with a gun. Get out of here now. Now it was strategically brilliant in hindsight because it got him off guard. Her security guard from the gate heard the commotion came running in. This guy was so rattled, he ran out of there for getting his checkbook behind.

9:25I was embarrassed because I froze I didn't know what to do and by the time I'm 14 I was always feeling like you know I'm the boy the man protect my mother you know I had all these kind of illusions about myself but I was always ashamed of the story because I did nothing now I asked my mom afterward I said mom that was crazy weren't you scared didn't you see a gun she said absolutely I was scared but just because you're scared doesn't mean you do nothing. And that kind of stuck in my head. I was at one level ashamed of myself, but I was also kind of in awe of my mother. I hid that story. Honestly, I never told anybody that story till I wrote this book because I was a little ashamed of my own self in this context.

10:12It's an incredible story and I'm glad you're telling it. And I absolutely agree with your mother. And this is something you say in your book that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. And yet you could have made a move that got you and your mother killed. So there's also some expression about discretion is the better part of valor or whatever, you know, like there is some wisdom to, I don't know about freezing, but at least contemplating carefully so that you don't provoke the guy with the gun to kill everybody. So you know, Dan, the first essay I could find on courage was written by Aristotle, who was describing the ideal soldier.

10:57Way back then, he made a distinction between courageous and reckless. In fact, he had cowardice at one extreme, reckless at the other extreme, and courage was in the middle. It was intentional, thoughtful action. Now, there's a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking here, because if the action works out, then it was courageous. If it didn't work out, then you say reckless. So I grant you that. But in her mind, she realized, she said, if I hadn't gone to him right away, what was his next move? His next move was to take the gun out. And she said, the next move was not to point it at her, because he needed her signature.

11:36He was going to point it at me. And she said, then I knew I had to sign the document. so she said I had a very narrow window and let me tell you where it goes back to the larger point is fear is a natural human response it's biologically hardwired it's a primitive emotion that activates the amygdala it's the survival impulse so we need it but it paralyzes us And so much of our life, so many things we do, whether in one of your episodes you talked about silence, being quiet, not speaking up, even having worry, anxiety, all these things tie back to fear. There's a diffuse manifest fear. And we don't have a way to cope with fear.

12:31Winston Churchill said, fear is a reaction, courage is a decision. So what I came to realize is that if any of us, myself included, I'm going to live a more complete life, I need to find a way to learn to live with fear, engage it, not be ashamed of it. And this ability to learn to accept fear for what it is, but not be overwhelmed by fear, was the journey I had to go through. And I was trying to understand it better as I wrote this book because, you know, too many of us live our life through a lens of fear. I'll speak only for myself. It's a very prominent player in my psychology. I do want to come back to this difference between courage and recklessness, though, and what you said about how the Monday morning quarterback.

13:24back, there's a way in which your mom's actions could have backfired in ways in which would have led us to describe it as reckless. How can we think about being on the right side of that line when we're in an acute situation? There's no easy answer to that, first of all. So let me first start with the point of origin of fear, and then I'll get to your point, actually. Where does fear come from? Fear originates in uncertainty. What is uncertainty? Uncertainty is not the same as risk. Risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes of 10 % chance of this, 30 % chance of this, 50 % chance of this, and you're playing the odds.

14:07Uncertainty is I don't know. I don't know. Early days of COVID, or job dislocation, or a diagnosis of a very deadly illness or even something more simpler like college applications. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? Or finding a spouse. Uncertainty is everywhere, which means fear is everywhere. Now, how do we deal with this fear in a reasonable way? Because the default answer to fear is not fight or flight. It's freeze or flight. Sometimes doing nothing is riskier than doing something that might not work out. My mother's calculus was doing nothing was not an option. But it required her to deal with her fear.

14:57Because she could have just sat back and waited it out to see how this plays out. But if you saw this guy's violent outburst, you would have known that he wasn't going to stop. I am not leaving here till you sign this. This thing was going south very fast. So I think you're right. There is always going to be a fine line here. And not every courageous story we know ends up with a happy ending also, right? But the question is, how do we learn to tame fear? How do we learn to understand a fear? And how do we learn to then take the best course of action we possibly can versus fear clouds judgment, fear clouds the The amygdala fear clouds the prefrontal cortex and we are just paralyzed.

15:47I think what you're saying is that it can be very hard in the moment to draw the line between courage and recklessness. And often it's only clear in hindsight based on the result. But what the most important thing to do here is to learn how to tame our fear so that we can make the best decision possible, fully understanding that there may be outcomes we don't like. We are taking a risk, hopefully a calculated risk, when we act out of courage. Exactly. So what I've discovered is these people who are courageous, as we characterize them, they somehow instinctively have created a system in their own minds about learning to tame fear, even sometimes trick fear.

16:38They have a relationship with fear that somehow allows them not to be paralyzed by it. Now, I tried to find the social science research around it saying like, what are these people doing here? And I was looking not at like famous characters only, right? I was looking at Brandon Say, a cashier at a dance hall in California when a mass shooter came in. Captain Sullenberger who landed the plane in the Hudson River. But not just people like that who are in the moment courageous. I also looked at Frances Haugen, who was my former student, who spent one year agonizing over whether she should be the whistleblower at Facebook.

17:16And so there is sometimes there are instinctive, in moment courage. Some are more intentional, deliberate courage. Some involve physical courage, meaning it's physical danger. Some are moral courage. The word courage gets associated a lot and is confused. So I was trying to say, my biggest learning was that courage is accessible to all. It's a skill, it's a muscle we can all acquire. Given the uncertainty in the world around us and the manifest fear that comes with it, I think it's important to think about courage as a currency we all need today. We need to resource ourselves to not let fear paralyze us in the world we are trying to navigate and live through right now.

18:01Okay. So if the operating thesis of the book is that courage is a trainable skill, not an unalterable factory setting, the how of that you divide up into nine steps or nine C's, nine words that begin with C, words like coping and confidence and commitment. So let's start working through some of these C's. We may not get through all of them, but let's do as many as we can in the time we have. The first of the nine C's is coping. What do you mean by that? I should preface that by saying historically human beings, when they'd encountered uncertainty and fear, they prayed. A belief in a higher power.

18:44The most effective way humankind for thousands of years has found to deal with uncertainty is to pray. A belief in a higher source as being there for me is an important way in which people kind of cope. Now, there are other ways in which people also understand this. And I found the following among most of these people. If you look at how people operate, we don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. Now, what do I mean by that? We all look at the world through a lens of meaning and identity. Why am I here? Captain Sullenberger, who landed the plane in a U.S. Airways flight in the Hudson River, had 90 seconds to do it.

19:32The KD Couric asked him, what were you thinking when you had to do that? He said, I realized in that moment that my 40 years of flying, My entire life up to that moment had been a preparation to handle that moment. This was it. This was my moment. When I talked to Summa Jain, a physician in New Orleans, ER physician, in the early days of COVID, a young doctor who has two kids at home, young kids at home, and is worried she's going to bring COVID back home and give it to her family. And a decision she has to make is should she stay home or come to work? She says, this is my Olympic moment. I trained as a physician to do this.

20:13I had no option. I had to do it. So coping is one thing where you cope through belief in a higher power. Conviction is another thing where you believe in something. So those are the two I would start with. I discovered that most of these people had a personal belief. Now I'll go back to my mother. My mother was a self-made woman in a very male-dominated society where she had to fight against all kinds of gender odds to do what she had done. And she'd been pushed around by a lot of these people in business and government and so forth. And so this guy showing up was just another man showing up trying to bully her saying, I'm taking away your land and you can't do anything about it.

21:02so it touched her at a very personal level it was about her identity who am i so it starts from that kind of place where you have a conviction or a belief i mean francis haugen did not want to whistleblower because it would blow up her career hard charging harvard mba and she was talking to her parents and she said why me mom let somebody else do it there's a lot of people at facebook who should be doing this? Why should I do it? And her parents flipped around and said, if not you, then who? And she was like, yeah. But that story also reveals another scene, which is courage rarely happens alone.

21:44The Hollywood portrayal is one of like James Bond, Jason Bond, the solitary hero. It's usually a collective effort. You know, so I've talked about the first one. I've talked about conviction. I'm not talking about connection. I found that there were four aspects of connection. People looked for resource support. They looked for information support. They looked for moral support. And they looked for feedback support. If you look at how Frances Haugen did it, she found all these forms of support from her network of people, Her family was one. A friend of hers who's a priest was another one who gave her feedback.

22:34A lawyer at a firm that specialized in whistleblowing was another one. A Wall Street Journal editor was another one. So it was the collective that gave it to her. But you know, the modern day version of courage we tell is one of the solitary solo effort. I've talked about three now with you. I just jumped ahead a little bit here. I'll tell you my favorite though. Can I get to my favorite one? Sure. There's two actually. The first one is called comprehension. And it comes from research by a University of Michigan professor, Carl Weick. And he was studying firefighters. And what he found is that firefighters don't just run into a building.

23:19That's reckless, right? They're not running into a building. What they do is they observe the building from outside. They see how fast the fire is going. They try to find out, is somebody need to be rescued? They see if there's anything combustible there and they form an initial hypothesis. Then they go into the building. As soon as they go into the building, they gather more information. Each step more they go in, they are updating their belief. It's what we call acting your way into knowing. most of us want to know before we act that's why we say let's be deliberate let's be cautious sometimes there's no way to know without taking action so if you're making a big decision sometimes you break it down into smaller decisions and each small step you take you're taking it in order to learn more so sometimes you have to act your way into knowing now i'll add to that, another point, which is I call confidence.

24:25I don't like that confidence word. It comes from research by a Stanford professor named Albert Bandura. Bandura was also interested in fear. And he recruited Stanford undergraduate students who were terrified of snakes, technical term is videophobes. And he was going to convince them over a period of several weeks with slow exposure, showing them videos and all, to ultimately hold a snake. Actually, a corn snake. They're harmless, don't bite, but they're six feet long, they look scary. Half the students dropped out as the study progressed. The other half who stuck in there eventually held a snake.

25:11What's most interesting is not that they did it, but how this simple study transformed how they thought about themselves. It made them realize that if I can overcome one of my worst nightmare fears, snakes, I can do anything. And he called this research self-efficacy, what in local parlance we would call can-do mindset. I can do it. Now you see that with entrepreneurs, not all, some entrepreneurs. no matter how many setbacks come their way and the business is failing they're running out of cash everything is going wrong I don't know I'm going to get it done I can't do it I got it I'll figure it out what I was trying to do was understand how these people resource themselves in different ways to really take on fear I'll give you one last one and then I'll promise to shut up is calm And this one you've dealt with in some of your episodes.

26:14Because one way to think about calm is meditation. The modern day psychology version of this is what is called emotional self-regulation. So sports psychologists are all over this. Because what is their number one job? To keep their player calm in the face of a very stressful situation. There's a whole bunch of strategies inside the calm chapter where I talk about how do these people. And meditation is a very important part of that story too, by the way. But there are other tactical things they do as well. Well, maybe say a little bit more about what those are. So one of them is rituals. I interviewed a Ukrainian commando at the frontline who used to be a lawyer till four years ago.

26:59And he said that on the frontline, he has a whole set of morning safety rituals he does. that he believes invoke a higher power that he believes are going to protect him in this moment. So rituals serve several purposes. One is it invokes a higher power that we believe is going to protect us. It also is a very useful distraction technique. It normalizes things. You stop thinking about the situation. So you compartmentalize. So if you look at Captain Sullenberger, what do pilots do? Immediately when this thing happens, he starts to make a checklist. And pilots do that because checklist, you stop thinking about the situation and landing the plane on the Hudson.

27:42No pilot has ever done this before. The last time a pilot tried to do it, the plane flipped and half of them died. I have to do that in the next 90 seconds. No, he's just going through his checklist. Here's my checklist. Step number one, step number two, step number three, step number four. So how these people find ways to tame their fear, outwit their fear, is interesting. And I've given you extreme examples, but I've come to realize most of us in our lives, we're living our fears, not our dreams. There is this diffuse fear that most of us don't even see it. And it really undermines our ability to make choices, take actions that might allow us to live to our fullest potential.

28:34You know, daily choices that paralyze us. You know, some have described courage as the master virtue that unlocks all other virtues. That without courage, you can't really experience other virtues. Now, having said that, I also wrote my first chapter was on cowardice. Coward is one of the worst words you can use to describe somebody. But I think it's important to start this journey by first recognizing that fear is normal. You got to name it to tame it, first of all. There's a lot of shaming around fear. Don't be scared. I remember doing that to my kids myself, right? I don't want to go to the basement, dad.

29:14It's scary. I'm like, what do you mean it's scary? Get down there. And we do it much more to boys than girls. There's a gender bias here. so we create a very antagonistic denial relationship with fear i think fear has to be our friend you know i gotta like okay fear i feel it i feel it i'm okay with being scared but we don't see that in modern day media we look at the heroic characters we read about and see we never hear about them being scared mahatma gandhi you know amazing individuals before he started his political career, he was a lawyer in London. He was terrified of public speaking. When he went for his first case in front of a judge, he froze.