The Experimental Mindset Every Leader Needs - Anne-Laure Le Cunff

22:22Anne-Laure Le Cunff:a commitment to curiosity. You're committing to collecting your own data. You're committing to withhold judgment until you completed the experiment. So just like a scientist who doesn't poke at the data in the middle and you don't go like, oh, I don't like what I'm seeing. Let's stop the experiment. You finish collecting your data and only at the end, you look at what happened and then you make a call in terms of what you want to do next. Should we iterate? Should we tweak anything and that's why I call it a pact you're really committing to being curious seeing

22:58unknown host:it through yes you said a word there that I think is very strong judgment so I've just done some a small psychology training where they were saying that the number one saboteur we all have is the judge can you give me a bit more understanding from your own experience and also as a neuroscientist of what is this judgment and how can we learn to maybe navigate it better have a relationship with it better? What can we learn? Well, I think it starts with a little bit

23:27Anne-Laure Le Cunff:of also self-compassion here, because you cannot talk about judgment without talking about belonging. And in essence, a lot of the self-judgment we experience is a desire to belong and the fear that if we don't do the right thing, if we don't make the correct decision, if we look like a fool, then we're going to be rejected by other people so i think the first part is really just understanding that you're basically just being almost like a little child who just wants to belong who just wants to make sure they have friends and he's scared that they're going to be rejected by others this is really where judgment comes from that's the first part and the second part is always and this is always the recommendation i give is that do not try to repress those automatic responses again your brain is trying to do its job being rejected from the tribe in the past meant death okay and so that's why that's also why we're so scared when we're on stage doing public speaking and all of that we're putting ourselves in situations where in the past if you had a hundred pairs of eyes looking at you and waiting for you to say something that was not good news it was really scary you probably did something wrong yes i get it yep so our brain is interpreting all of those signals as oh risky i could be kicked out i could from the tribe i could be rejected and uh feeling the feeling knowing what it is naming it labeling it psychologists call that affective labeling just putting a label on an emotion on a feeling allows you to process it better.

25:07unknown host:Apparently it diffuses it doesn't it?

25:09Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yes. It just helps.

25:09unknown host:Yeah.

25:10Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah. It's because it re-engages the prefrontal cortex so it really helps you think about the feeling which is really helpful in terms of processing it. So naming it, labeling it, processing it and then deciding what you want to do from a place of alignment with what you actually want to do not based on fear it's not easy and again it's always a little it's a little dance that you

25:36unknown host:need to practice it is because i say i've been practicing this for about seven years and it does take practice and i think a lot of people will read something or listen to a podcast and go yeah i know how to do that logically but it is like you say go to the gym to build muscle you've got to keep going like just keep learning and practicing every day with your mind and it i think it becomes more autopilot eventually when you do it more but yeah it does take a bit of effort to start with. Does this link into, I loved one of the chapters in the book, Procrastination is Not the Enemy. And I was like, oh, okay, looking forward to diving into this bit because I think so many of us think it is.

26:10unknown host:Does this sort of link into our relationship then with procrastination?

26:14Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Absolutely. Procrastination is fascinating in the sense that this is something we all experience that we never talk about at a personal level. Everybody is happy to talk about procrastination at a conceptual level. Oh, procrastination. Oh, yeah, this is hard when we procrastinate. You never walk to your boss saying, I'm sorry, I didn't finish the presentation because I was procrastinating. Nobody does that. And the reason why is because procrastination has been moralized in the sense that it's been associated with lack of willpower, lack of discipline, laziness. And so we don't want to say out loud, I procrastinate.

26:53Anne-Laure Le Cunff:We don't want to be associated with those, what we see as a moral failure, really. But procrastination is just a signal from your brain. That's just what it is. It's your brain trying to tell you that something is not quite right with the task you're working on at the moment.

27:12unknown host:That's it.

27:13Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so if instead of repressing that signal, ignoring that signal, and very often blaming ourselves in the process, we just listen to it. We could learn a lot and we could find a way to get unstuck. So in the book, I share a little tool that is just a structured way to have a conversation with your procrastination. Oh, let's go. Yes. And it starts by welcoming your procrastination. I know it's going to sound silly, but really try it next time where you say,

27:43unknown host:oh welcome back here you are again hi you are again um i believe you have a message for me

27:49Anne-Laure Le Cunff:what are you trying to communicate what are you trying to tell me and this is the little tool now is the problem coming from the head from the heart or from the hand okay if the problem is coming from the head it means that at a rational level you're not fully convinced you should be working on this task so maybe someone put it on your to-do list and it doesn't make sense maybe you're not the right person to do it. Maybe AI should do it. Maybe someone else on the team should do it. Maybe the task is just not aligned with the general vision and mission of the company you're working for. Something at a rational level is off.

28:23Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so you procrastinate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, the task doesn't look like it's going to be fun, enjoyable, you're not feeling enthusiastic about it. And so you procrastinate. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right tools, the right skills, or the right support from your team in order to do the task. And so you procrastinate. What's really interesting is that when you have this conversation with your procrastination, when you treat it as a signal from your brain and you listen to it and you try to understand what's going on.

29:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It also gives you a systematic way to address the challenge, to address the resistance. So if the problem is coming from the head, then go back to the task. That can be with your team. And you can, yes, you can do that. I literally did it yesterday with my team in the lab. You can say, hey, I've been procrastinating on this thing for two weeks now. And I think this is because it doesn't work. It's not aligned with what we said we were going to do. can we take 15 minutes and have a quick chat nice and go back to the task and just make sure we're lying here all of a sudden procrastination is something you can share with other people as a tool to make better decisions yeah if it's coming from the heart then so rationally you're convinced you should be doing it but emotionally there's a bit of resistance make it fun grab your favorite colleague and do a little co-working session go to your favorite coffee shop give yourself a little reward.

29:52Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And if the problem is coming from the hand, then raise that hand, ask for help. Instead of staying stuck and paralyzed, ask for the resources that you need. And that can be coaching, mentoring, that can be financial resources. Sometimes if you don't have the budget to do the thing you're being asked to do, whatever resources you need to get the job done.

30:13unknown host:Where does fear sit in those threes? Fear, the heart, the emotional response. If you've got something you really want to do and you know it's your dream to do it but just fear is getting in

30:22Anne-Laure Le Cunff:the way yeah is that fear can be sometimes emotional in the sense that it is more connected to your kind of self-belief what you think you know like maybe fear of being judged fear of failing etc it can also come from the practical level where you don't think you're able to do it so you don't feel like you're equipped you don't have the right knowledge to do it at a practical level is usually a little bit easier to solve in the sense that you just need to get those resources yeah so the training the support and all of that when the fear is really coming from purely an emotional level it's a little bit harder and this is where having psychological safety in the workplace is so important because very often this takes more of a coaching conversation with you know your manager um or an external coach if you don't have that at work but it takes a little bit of deeper work to go and untangle this it's interesting you mentioned psychological safety

31:24unknown host:that is coming up more in my conversations this year than ever before and actually seeing less of it are you noticing or aware of any patterns with the amount of uncertainty that's now rising that psychological safety is going down because what i'm seeing is a lot of self-preservation self-protection, even teams closing in on themselves and not sharing as much anymore. Are you noticing any of that?

31:47Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Absolutely. And this is just another instance of compensatory control. So we feel uncertain. We're scared of what's going to happen next. We don't feel like we have the right tools. We don't feel like we're equipped to deal with that uncertainty. And so we respond with this artificial control, trying to only work with people we know, trying to only work with the systems we understand things we've done in the past that worked and although they don't work today this is why i always talk about the illusion of certainty it doesn't give you actual certainty it just gives you the illusion of certainty and it really prevents you from exploring better ways of solving those challenges

32:27unknown host:my brain is dotting all over the place at the moment it's so exciting talking to you because it's then jumped to a place in the book where you talk about um the ones that children have with curiosity and uncertainty and something really hit me where you're saying like as adults we actually make our world smaller and we have a smaller sort of group of friends we produce our hobbies like crazy um and probably produce the type of films we go to do and everything is is that again that thing of where does that where does that curiosity go yeah well at a developmental

33:02Anne-Laure Le Cunff:level there's a part where obviously we have learned a lot of things right when we're an adult and so you don't necessarily need to be learning at the same rate that you are as a kid i think it's important to acknowledge um you know the you when you're making an omelet in the morning it's a good thing that you're not wondering every morning how to break an egg and how to i'm rubbish you're making omelets but i get it i get it but they are they are hopefully things that now you have internalized and and this is what allows you to function as an adult right so this part of that that being said we still there are so many more things that we could learn and we become a little bit more uncomfortable exploring and part of it is linked to the fact that it's kind of the the other side of that coin that we're supposed to be an adult now You're supposed to know what you're doing.

33:55Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And it's really, really hard to put ourselves in situations where we're a beginner again, where we have no idea what we're doing, where, again, we could look like a fool in front of other people. And so this is why I hear a lot of people saying, oh, I wish I could learn to play this instrument. I wish I could learn this language. I wish I could do all of these things. But it's too late. And lastly, part of it is time anxiety. it's really this idea that you're supposed to make the most of your time yeah and you feel like maybe you should keep on investing and getting better in things that you know already versus starting from scratch so true yeah and uh and we limit ourselves again because what we don't think about and so interesting when i hear people definitely having those signs of time anxiety and they're in their 50s and it's like you're still so young you have decades yeah long time yes but you're acting as if you only had five years left right and i'm i'm guilty of of time anxiety also i don't know if guilty really is the right word here but i do experience time anxiety quite often there are so many things where i have to remind myself i have time i can start now it doesn't come naturally and i was sharing with you actually before we hit record that

35:14unknown host:something for me and I'm say 47 now going I'd like to go back into education I know that's one thing you did as well but I've definitely I was sharing with you is I don't know where to start I don't know I don't feel I understand the academia world I don't even know if I could do it as I've never done it and you just so simply said to me so easily we'll see it as an experiment do you want to share in terms of like when I shared that to you what happened in your brain and how you gave me that advice.

35:40Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah, when you shared this, I saw myself in you and so many other people in the sense that we somehow have decided that there are parts of our life or our career that are too big to experiment with. And it needs to be this very scary, overwhelming project, which means that we also never get started with it. And the reality is that almost absolutely anything can be turned into a tiny experiment. So even going back to university for a degree, a lot of people would say, oh, wow, this is like a two-year commitment. This is something that I need to decide where am I going to have to overhaul my entire life to do this?

36:18Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And if you remove that belief that comes from absolutely nowhere, rather we just think that that's the case, you can start doing a bit of research and you can discover that there are lots of degrees where you can do it module by module. And by doing six modules, you get a certain diploma by doing 12 modules you get another diploma all of a sudden it becomes an experiment try one module do you like it keep going and by the end of it you'll have all of your modules and you'll have your diploma but you're not going to discover that if you start from the belief that it's impossible it has to be big it has to be this huge i've got to find loads of time we're good yes exactly and so i would really encourage anyone and again every single time i give people advice it's also for me because oh yeah i genuinely still struggle with these things i still have those automatic responses um and so i always try to remind myself anytime i see this response where i say oh it has to be this big thing it has to be this big project wait a second what would be the tiny experiment version of this almost always there is a version

37:23unknown host:of that so it feels like what we've got getting better as human is being able to override the autopilot and that's i think if we can get that skill to hang on autopilately my brain's going this is big you don't know where to start you haven't got the qualifications or the proof that you can do it if i over get the skill in overriding that to go actually if i see it's an experiment and because i said i don't know if i want to do this or this or this you went well just try one if you don't like it try that and i was like oh yeah i think because our brain probably tries to

37:52Anne-Laure Le Cunff:find reasons as you said to keep us safe absolutely and on the certainty path and that's why i think

37:57unknown host:so many of us stayed stuck on the career ladder we've got to get to the top and all of that and i think this is where even as i'm talking taking a breath of you give yourself so much

38:06Anne-Laure Le Cunff:freedom if you see it as an experiment absolutely it's uh it's been liberating for me and i know it's been liberating for a lot of people to just have permission to try something without any specific outcome in mind and with the only outcome being self-discovery and that's it just a quick

38:26unknown host:reminder if you haven't already to please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. It's a small action that makes a big difference. You'll be the first to know when new episodes drop and your support helps us create meaningful content for leaders like you. I'd also love to hear from you so if you have any thoughts, questions or ideas pop them into the comments and if you're curious about how my leadership coaching or training could support you or your team, just drop me a DM and we'll set up a call.

38:55Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Thanks so much. Now let's get back to the episode.

38:58unknown host:In your book, you say the secret of better decision making. Could you expand on that? Because we are making, I don't even know, you probably know. How many decisions roughly do we make every single day? I think it was 80 ,000 or something like this. That's phenomenal. And some of those are really big decisions that can impact the lives of others as well. What is your thing of how we can start making better decisions? The main framework that I share with people,

39:22Anne-Laure Le Cunff:the shift in terms of how to approach decisions, is to incorporate both external and internal signals. So most leaders are very good at incorporating external signals in their decision making process. By external signals, I mean anything you can put in a dashboard. If it can be turned into a number, a metric, something you can track, and you can put that in a spreadsheet and present it. Ta-da! Ta-da! Great! We're making rational decisions. Internal signals are based on, first, intuition, but also emotions. How does it feel to work on this project? If all of the external signals are looking good, but your entire team is burned out, is that success?

40:11Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Is the project really successful? And I would argue that it isn't. And so to me, making better decisions is really about being able to, yes, the external signals are important, but also incorporate the internal signals of success. And based on that, decide whether you want to persist with your current approach. That's one path. Whether you want to pivot. So just tweak some of the parameters of your experiment and see if it would help. Or pause. We're allowed to stop a project that is not working. And I'm saying pause, I'm not saying abandon forever, because that same project might actually make sense in the future when the context is different, your team is different, you're different, you have different resources.

40:59Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So you can just put it on the shelf say right now based on the external and internal signals this is not working let's pause that is okay too yes isn't it it's just taking that moment to think and i love

41:12unknown host:when you said it to think about your thinking yes which if i'm correct is obviously metacognition yes is to kind of go and i'm thinking when i was listening to you i think that's some of the gaps we're thinking and reacting but we're not thinking about our thinking to go does this feel where we want to go in this moment using the external and the internal and bringing them together as a relationship? I think there's a lot of people out there, and this is just from my experience as well, in what I've come across, don't really know how to connect with their internal world. Some of you don't even know there's an internal world.

41:47unknown host:From your experience, how do you describe what an internal world is for people?

41:51Anne-Laure Le Cunff:your internal world is just another set of signals and i always talk about signals because i i think it helps people having language to actually explore this world that as you said can be a little bit more uncomfortable because we we haven't been taught to listen to the signals and so i really just tell people the same way you're turning your attention your curiosity outwards. You can do that inwards. And you can ask yourself questions. You can ask your body questions. You can ask, how does this feel? Am I energized by this idea? Am I excited? Or do I just want to, you know, sometimes during a meeting, you know, when you want to go and hide in the corner and you don't want to be here.

42:38Anne-Laure Le Cunff:You're like, why are we having this conversation? I don't want to be here that is such an interesting signal don't ignore it ask yourself why why do i want i especially if you love your job in general and there are conversations that you're trying to avoid yeah look inside go and explore this inner world there are so many interesting signals that you can learn

42:59unknown host:from and i think even sometimes i'm not a big journaler but trying to maybe write out your internal world can sometimes help make sense of it isn't it what's going on yeah with um just curious with burnout and listening to signals not listening to signals and obviously in your role I've been there as well my name was go to joe you were the yes person everything go to joe she'll sort it out that was me and I kind of wore it I did wear it as a bit of a badge of honor to be honest with you it's like oh yes I'm the one who can fix everything there was there's definitely ego attached to doing that as well as that fear of am I enough prove myself lots of things going on if anyone's in that sort of place at the moment where they're in that yes no they're that fixer that one that can always be relied on is checking their calendar when really they should be booking a doctor's appointment what advice would you give them and bear in mind they're not probably in a great place right now yeah what kind of what are just one to three little small things that they could do to maybe just get some clarity on the choices that they have in with in where they're

43:58Anne-Laure Le Cunff:at right now it's really about first observing the current situation we never do that and so I always tell people if you want to start experimenting, it starts with observation. So a simple exercise that you can do is pick a regular day, regular day at work. And I call this self-anthropology. The idea is to pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And for 24 hours, just observe and take little notes, again without judgment just observing and you can ask yourself questions like oh why do i spend my time like this oh i'm okay i'm feeling more energized when i have this conversation every time i talk to this person in the office i love it i get excited every time i'm being asked about this project i'm dragging my feet no judgment again taking little notes i only do it for 24 hours.

44:56Anne-Laure Le Cunff:It doesn't need, again, to be a big project. I guarantee you that if you do that, you will notice things that you've been doing in an automatic way without noticing, just because. That means those things can be things that can change. If you decide to experiment, pick something, and especially if at the moment you're very overwhelmed, there's a lot of uncertainty, pick something so small that it's almost impossible not to do. What's interesting is that people think that tiny experiments are always about adding something trying something new it can be about removing something and see what happens that's true actually to start with i thought it was about adding yeah you can you can remove something and so i've had people for example experiment with no meetings for a week and they just try to work with their team through emails seeing what happens what happens when we remove meetings after that experiment they realized that there were a lot of meetings that were not necessary.

45:53Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so they didn't go from, they didn't keep not having meetings, but they only kept the ones that they felt like they were missing during the experiment. A tiny experiment that is more personal, but I love is I will not bring my phone in my bedroom for a week. Yeah, that's it. And just notice the impact on your sleep, on your mental health, on your mood, on your productivity and creativity at work, because everything is connected. So you can even experiment with things that don't seem like they're directly linked to your leadership or to your work and see the downstream effects of removing some things, simplifying some things.

46:30Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So that's what I would recommend. First, observation, a little bit of self-anthropology for 24 hours and then picking something really small

46:38unknown host:that could even be something you remove instead of trying something new. Beautiful. I think that's absolutely brilliant. Thank you. This has been so fascinating and so so helpful so thank you what i would love to know is what advice if you were projecting into your future what advice would your future self give you now or even what experiment would your

47:02Anne-Laure Le Cunff:future self love you to be starting now i would say don't forget to take care of your body i have the kind of work that is uh you know a lot of writing and and research and it can be very easy for me to spend hours writing and maybe not drinking enough water or staying late on my computer in the evening because I really want to finish writing this research paper. And I think my future self will thank me if, despite the fact that I'm very excited about the work I do, I don't forget to take care of my body. And that's also why a lot of the experiments I do in my personal life at the moment are around walking, around eating better.

47:42They're really health focused.

47:44Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Yeah. And I think it is helpful. I do think it is helpful. They don't always work. There are things that I tried running as an experiment. That was a disaster. Not for me. But walking has been great. So, yeah, take care of your body.

48:02unknown host:I agree. I think the pact that I made from reading the book was to do at least 10 minutes of exercise every single day. And normally ends up being a lot more than 10 minutes. but it's just to do if I've got a day's tough I'll just do like the lymph movement and I'm like well I've done something I've moved so that's the path and it's it's interesting you say in action for a certain amount of time it has just stayed it has become a habit I know it doesn't need to but it's lovely it actually has just become something that's part of part of my life now um before we close is there anything we've missed any advice anything you think we've missed

48:35Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I don't think we missed anything just the last thing you just mentioned tiny experiments can be a great way to discover new habits. I find it absolutely crazy that people just decide to start a new habit they've never tried before and they commit to it for the rest of their lives. So maybe try it for a couple of weeks first and then you can promote it to the rank of habit

48:58unknown host:if it works for you. It's so true. Like I started playing golf. I was thinking, I'm not a golfer. Golf is boring. So immediately I was like, I need to go and play golf then if I'm saying this. and but initially you're like oh go and buy all the kit and everything it's like no let's just see how we get on with a few lessons but let's see what we do it is funny how we we dive all in again i suppose it gives us certainty got all the kit know what to do then it's like and then you don't want to fail or they say i've got to stick with it it's like do you really want to it is a minefield and fascinating how we work as human beings and thank you for helping break it down and just give us some tips um and what we can do to honestly it does give you more freedom and you helped me breathe breathe and you helped me really make some changes in my business last year so I'm ever so grateful for that and grateful for your time today thanks so much for having me thank you so much and thank you for everyone who's listening and watching and we'll see you soon if you've been enjoying the courageous leaders podcast we'd love it if you'd subscribe to our youtube channel your support helps us keep creating quality content and reaching more leaders like you who are ready to grow and make a real impact we fund this podcast ourselves so every subscription truly makes a difference and allows us to support courageous leaders like you.

50:10unknown host:Thank you for being part of the journey.