Why Grit Isn’t Always Enough with Angela Duckworth

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20:35Brené Brown:So the weirdest thing happened to me when I was reading this book. And I don't know why I'm so emotional about it, but it's really weird. So I split my time between Houston and Austin. and Houston's kind of the house where we raised our kids. And I'm a maximalist. Adam is a minimalist.

20:54Angela Duckworth:Why are you going to Austin? Like at all? I thought you were just in Houston.

20:58Brené Brown:No, because I work in Austin a lot. I teach in the MBA program at UT and I have a lot of work here. So, and both my kids are off building their big lives. But I was sitting in Austin where I stay when I'm here and I was doing some creative exercises and I called Steve and I was so weepy and he said, what's wrong? And I said, I can't be creative here. And he said, why? And I said, because there's not enough of Ellen and Charlie's art on the walls here. And he said, what do you mean? And I was in your book and I said, it's a situational variable. And he said, okay. And I said, there is some beautiful art here.

21:45Brené Brown:It's a beautiful photography here, but I need the kids art to remind me that that's my favorite art and it's imperfect. And they just did it without thinking about it. And that's what inspires me to do my best work.

22:01Angela Duckworth:You know, it seems like a crazy thing to say, right? It does. It feels weird talking about it. You have your laptop. You like it. Yeah. But, and Adam might know this. We know, and Brene, do you also know Bob Cialdini, the psychologist who wrote Influence? No, I don't know him. He does not hang out in Houston much, nor Austin. But if you ever go to Arizona, I mean, you know, that's where he lives. And when he was writing the book Influence, he was finding himself to be pedantic, long-winded, and dry, which is how you write a scientific journal article. the drier the better right and he's just like oh god how am i writing a book about my research on persuasion for an audience of more than seven people and and what he did was he changed where he started writing he moved from his campus office where he was professor robert cialdini to his home office where he was Bob.

23:00Angela Duckworth:And those physical cues, right, the setting, you know, it inspired a different character. And I think this is why when you tune into the Oscars, you know, there is an Oscar for set design. There is an Oscar for costumes. You know, Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage and each of us its players. And what's on that stage, the props, the backdrop, the lighting, I think it makes a huge difference. And I think we have the view of human beings as being reflective, like we are the reflective animal, but we are much more reactive, I think, than we would admit. And so there are these trigger cues, you know, like when I'm in my house, my voice is a half octave higher than talking to you, right?

23:48Angela Duckworth:Like When I drop into Professor Angela Duckworth and I do this and I'm like, I'm all business. I have a cousin who's a physician and we could be having a conversation. But when I trigger cue her with, so I've got this cut and her voice drops and she goes into physician mode, right? So I do think there are these situational trigger cues that bring out oneself or another. And they seem trivial, but they're not. They're really not. We should take them seriously. Angela, I think anyone who's with us right now can relate to this. We all have places where we do our best work, where we struggle to concentrate, where we find creative inspiration, where we feel like we've never had an original thought.

24:31At the same time, I'm really troubled by the reality that we are so malleable. And I think about the power of habits, which is something you've spent a lot of your career studying. And I think, you know what? I don't have to be in the right hotel room to brush my teeth. I don't need the right toothbrush or the right floss, right? I do it regardless of my circumstances. And I want to be more immune to my surroundings. What can you tell us about that?

24:55Angela Duckworth:Well, as we all know, nearly half of human behavior is habit, but the other half is goal-directed. That's the research of Wendy Wood. And what has Wendy Wood and other habit researchers discovered? covered well you know you can actually override any habit system with the goal system like if you have the habit of driving home a certain way you can overwrite it and like stop at the supermarket human beings are able to do that but very often we have what are called habit slips and you're like oh no the habit system was just in charge and you know i can't tell you how many times i've checked into a hotel and like just forgotten to you know do one thing or another especially work out i'm like oh right just it just i didn't have the cues it wasn't in the routine.

25:39Angela Duckworth:So yeah, maybe I should have turned on my goal system. And sometimes you have to do that. But I think a wiser approach to changing yourself is to start with the situation. And if you are asking me about the science of habit, something that I don't think is understood, even though there's so much written about habit, so much published about habit in the broader sort of media environment, here's something that habit researchers like Wendy Wood cannot seem to get across to people. A habit is a behavior that is repeatedly rewarded. And then the brain goes on a kind of neural autopilot. It doesn't need to think, what should I do?

26:16Angela Duckworth:It just does. But it can only do that in a stable situation. In other words, you are not able to do anything habitual unless it has a trigger. The trigger doesn't have to be physical. It can be like, when I'm hungry, then I do this, like when I'm angry. And I'm not saying all habits are good, right? Like grinding your teeth is a habit too, like when I'm stressed. But the idea is that preceding any habitual reaction, there is a stimulus, a situational cue. And therefore, if you want to build habits, right? If you're worried about the half of human behavior that is on autopilot, and you're saying, that's where I want my exercise routine, right?

26:59Angela Duckworth:That's where I'm my writing routine. That's where I want my mindfulness routine. Then you 100 % have to honor the situation. And you have to design the situation with the cues that you will reliably encounter.

27:11Brené Brown:Oh, my God. That is, you could just come to my house and do a study on if I lay my workout clothes out the night before I go to sleep.

27:20Angela Duckworth:Is that not the best hack ever? That's the best hack ever. Isn't it a miracle? It's a miracle. It's like nothing, Brene, right? Like, okay, I keep my workout clothes in this one drawer in my bureau. I mean, it's really not that hard to reach down into this drawer. And it's all, like, folded and dry. So, like, how hard can it be to reach into that drawer and take out this, you know, top and this pair of shorts and this pair of socks? The miracle that happens when that top, that pair of shorts, and that pair of socks are laying on top of the same bureau. And it's the first thing I see. I mean, first of all, you can't get into other clothes when you have an outfit out.

27:59Angela Duckworth:You're just like, I'm going to wear this because it's sitting there. This kind of micro friction, as a postdoc who works with me, as Safa Mazar calls it, it is incredibly powerful. And once you put on the workout clothes, right, there you go. I mean, nobody doesn't work out in their workout clothes. That's my number one exercise hack is to put my workout clothes out the night before. I wonder if there's a gender difference here. Wait, Adam, are you not a workout clothes layer outer? No, I don't think about close at all. Do you have a problem? You work out regularly, right? So you don't need this hack.

28:32Yeah, I don't think you need it. For me, it takes willpower not to work out.

28:36Angela Duckworth:Okay, well, then maybe you don't need this hack. You know what? I actually really enjoy working out too. I'm not one of those people for whom like working out is an exercise and delay of gratification. Like when I'm at Pilates, I enjoy Pilates. But even for me, I have found that it helps. And I will say this, Adam, you know, I'm not saying you have to do anything differently, but I've gotten to know Alistair Brownlee, the world-renowned triathlete, some would argue the greatest triathlete ever. And he lays out his workout clothes the night before. You make sure they're dry. He puts his sneakers right where he can see them.

29:10Angela Duckworth:And so I find it interesting that even people who have a lot of willpower and a lot of motivation, and sometimes people who exercise is the only thing they do, they often use this too. I don't think micro friction benefits anybody when the micro friction is an obstacle to your goals.

29:26Brené Brown:I agree. And for me, I have to lay them out because if I see them, then I have to acknowledge I am choosing to not do what I know is good for me. I am making a choice. If I don't see them, it's just like, yeah, I'm really busy. I got a lot of shit to do. But if I see them, I am choosing a lot of shit to do over myself and my health.

29:49Angela Duckworth:It's not just friction. I think you're like making it obvious, right? Like human attention is a pinhole camera. You're thinking about one thing and you're not thinking about not a million things, but a trillion other things, right? So when you lay eyes on your workout clothes, boom, comes to mind. You're like workout, exercise, health. if you're not looking at your workout clothes you could be thinking about who knows what right like you know does brad pitt have veneers like what's for dinner like what am i doing at 10 o 'clock today like i think he does by the way but never thought about that one before a hundred oh i thought about that yeah i think yeah i thought about it too yeah a hundred percent yeah which i have nothing against but i'm just saying my dentist says everyone has veneers um so so you know, your mind wanders, right?

30:34Angela Duckworth:And your mind is reactive. And this is why advertising works, right? So you have to put in your own billboards, right? Like install your own reminders.

30:43Brené Brown:Oh, I love that. Put up your own billboards.

30:45Angela Duckworth:Put up your own billboards. You know, there's a person that Adam and I both know, but Brene, since you're mostly in Austin and Houston and not in Philadelphia, you probably don't know Chaz Howard, who's the chaplain of the University of Pennsylvania, where Adam and I both teach. and he surrounds himself with books, as I think we all do. I'm usually surrounded by books, but I'm here in another room doing this recording. But he goes beyond that. He is very intentional about the spines of the books that are at eye level. And he keeps the books turned so that he can see the title outward that he just wants to be reminded of.

31:23Angela Duckworth:I'm not saying that he walks back by that bookshelf and takes every book off the shelf and reads it every day. But he is installing billboards, right? People get tattoos. They wear their faith around their neck. Why do they do that? They do that to be reminded of their values and their goals. And so that's the kind of intentional choice that I'm talking about. And it's a seemingly trivial one, but I think it's the tip of the iceberg, right? If you can do that, then you can ask yourself, like, who am I spending my time with? You can ask yourself, like, should I be living in Houston or should I be living in Austin or should I live somewhere else?

31:59Angela Duckworth:I think these are the bigger questions, but you can get there by starting small.

32:05Brené Brown:It's interesting. I was just thinking I have my two watches on. And why? Just my Apple Watch is just linear, regular time. And my grandmother's watch is Kairos, God time, qualitative time, and a reminder that I need to make choices based on both. The quantitative time. Yeah, but it's a billboard. And on my other wrist, I have a tattoo that symbolizes between stimulus and response. There is a space in that space as choice. And so I have my billboards at all times.

32:37Angela Duckworth:yeah right and by the way you don't need to be reminded it's not like you haven't memorized that sentence right between it's just that you want to you know and when your eyes alight on it that's your it's such a brilliant but also so obvious way to control your attention that i don't think people i can't tell you how many people for example have reread many times eckhart toll's the power of now oh god yeah and you know like well you read it once and you're like, okay, I should be mindful. But like, why are they, you know, rereading it? Why do they have a copy of it? Like, because they're putting it in their situation.

33:12Angela Duckworth:They know that if you want to do anything, including mindful attention to the present, you got to design your physicals to make that possible. Same reason why people go on retreats and so forth, right? It's like the way to get into this kind of, I want to control this thought and I want to, is actually with the situation, I think. Obviously, am I biased? I don't know. Adam's less biased because he didn't write a book about it, although you sort of have, I think, in many ways, Adam. But you can tell me if you disagree. I don't disagree. I'm actually really struck by the tattoo observation here.

33:47And I think there's a study waiting to be done. I've always thought about tattoos as an image thing. You're trying to project something about yourself to other people.

33:57Angela Duckworth:You're projecting the tattoos for other people. Yeah, but I'm hearing now there's an identity element of it. And I wonder, here's the study idea. Do people whose tattoos are visible to others, but not themselves have more struggles following through on their plans and goals than people who can see their own tattoos, even if they're not visible to others? Oh, so you're doing like a forearm versus like torso. So I don't know. I think, Brene, you're the only one among the three of us who has a tattoo. What do you think?

34:29Brené Brown:I think a hundred tattoos on a hundred people, a hundred different reasons. Some to capture something they never want to forget. I mean, a lot of people get tattoos when someone dies, some of them as reminders and their own billboards. I think there's a lot of different reasons that people do it. And so I think it'd be, there'd be a lot of confounding variables around that. But one of the things this book really helped me do is for me, situation, context, color, connective tissue is everything. I think situational awareness is probably a superpower, unfortunately, because the way I was raised, and I think it's probably the downside of situational awareness is hypervigilance.

35:08Brené Brown:Maybe I'm constantly...

35:10Angela Duckworth:Oh, that's interesting. Are you hypervigilant?

35:13Brené Brown:Yeah, I can be very hypervigilant.

35:15Angela Duckworth:Oh, to threat? Are you like scanning the horizon for threat or just in other ways?

35:20Brené Brown:For understanding who's here, what's the dynamic?

35:24Angela Duckworth:Oh, so you think you might have an excess of situational awareness. I can. I have to bring it in sometimes. Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah. I think you're the exception.

35:33Brené Brown:It also led me to believe that I was very committed to raising my kids in a Montessori environment. Because Montessori is very based on situational, cluttered rooms, cluttered minds. Yeah, that is a design situation. That's a design situation. Yeah. And even my kids, I remember my dad watching my kids and And he said, Charlie, what are you doing? Charlie said, I'm putting my work away for new work. So he was putting a toy away to get out another toy. Because in his Montessori program, it was like one toy at a time. And my dad was like, God damn, sis, you're running a tight ship around here. I was like, no, no, that's Maria Montessori.

36:11Angela Duckworth:Did they go all the way through? How long did they do Montessori?

36:15Brené Brown:Through kinder. And then they went to public schools. Okay, right. So all of their preschool years. Yeah. So very, very formative. Very much. Yeah, how was it for you? What was your observation? Well, at first I was like, holy shit, why does my two-year-old have a glass pitcher and real glasses? And what's happening here? And spoons. And they just were very much, they were almost kind of Piagetan in their thinking. They were just very much like the situation dictates how they think of themselves, how they think of their work, and how they think of each other.

36:50Angela Duckworth:It's also a social element, right? Because the Montessori is mixed age, right? So that's very intentional. Yeah, I mean, Marie-Anne Montessori thought very hard about what situation does a child need to be in to develop.

37:03Brené Brown:Yes. And it was interesting because Charlie had one of those weird birthdays, an August birthday. And when we were talking to his Montessori teacher, she said, you know, he's academically ready for kindergarten. But one of the things that we'd like to invite you to consider situationally is that he gets to be the oldest in the room, so he will miss his mentoring year. Right. So what did you decide to do? He stayed in Montessori for another year and then went to public school kindergarten and did that year again. What do they mean by mentoring you when he mentored the younger kids? Yes, so that he had been mentored.

37:39Brené Brown:At age five. Yes, but that he was the, I'll show you how to hold the glass. I'll show you why we wash our own glasses. And so let me ask you these. I have to get to these, and I'm aware of time, but there are so many freaking paradoxes in your book. And Adam and I always laugh at the paradox, having the podcast paradox. Yes. So can you just comment on these paradoxes as I run through them? Sure. Self-control can sometimes mean needing less self-control.

38:12Angela Duckworth:Self-control, the paradox of self-control is that to delay gratification, you have to create immediate gratification. So you have to make exercise fun now. You have to make eating nutritiously something you enjoy now. You have to make what's good for you in the future what's good for you now. And the other paradox of self-control is that you control yourself by controlling the situation. So self-control sounds like something that can only be done on the inside. It's self-control. But depending on what you have out on the table and what you have out on the desk and the people you're with, like, you know, when I was in Miami during the pandemic, I had just written a New York Times op-ed on the importance of masking.

39:00Angela Duckworth:When we landed there, it was like the first time you could fly. You know, it was the first thing my family wanted to do was like leave Philadelphia. We get off the plane and nobody's masking. I was like, hello, people. It's a global pit. Hello, COVID-19. So day one, we're like indignant. Day two, we're self-righteous. And day three, I'm sorry to say, we weren't masking either, right? It was just, I couldn't believe it. I was just like marbling. But you know, I couldn't swim against the current. So we should control ourselves by controlling our situations. Angela Duckworth, you failed to cite your own research to make your point.

39:38Angela Duckworth:Well, which study, Adam? Well, I know you've done many, many, many of them, and it's hard to remember them all. But I'm thinking of your finding that the people who have the most self-control use it the least because they've arranged their situations to not have to exercise it. Yeah, I don't want to take credit for finding that many people, But I do think it was a revolution in self-control research world because when I went to graduate school, Brene, I was like 32 years old. It was 2002. And the first thing that I read were all these articles about how self-control is a muscle. And it was like you have to like exercise the willpower muscle.

40:11Angela Duckworth:And like if you do things like hold a hand grip tight for like five minutes, which is very hard and painful, then you'll be better at like, you know, not procrastinating and controlling your temper. And I did a bunch of willpower studies and they all failed. And what I and many other behavioral scientists have discovered is that willpower is exhausting. Willpower is fallible. It's not quite the muscle we think it is. And it is the worst way to change your behavior. So I don't want to take credit for that finding because over the last 20 years, it really has been a sea change in how we think about behavior change.

40:44Angela Duckworth:But it is an epiphany that we should be talking about more often.

40:51Brené Brown:Okay, so this is interesting and related. So the next paradox that I wrote down, agency can grow sometimes when our self-sufficiency story gets smaller.

41:03Angela Duckworth:You know, when we think that we are able to do things by ourselves, then we don't ask for help. When we think that it is our job to do things by ourselves, to be independent, Hello, I'm raising my hand to that one as well as you, Brene. Then, you know, we don't admit vulnerability. We don't admit like, I can't. And the courage to say, I can't. I can't do this alone. I need help. I don't have the answer. My motivation is an all-time low. I'm a dumpster fire. You know, we think of as shameful, embarrassing, an admission that we're lesser than. But it really has to be the lesson. And I have to credit you more than really anyone, Brene, for spreading this important message.

41:49Angela Duckworth:Like, it is strength to say I can't. It is strength to ask for help. It is strength to say I don't know. And it's been very hard for me, too, to do that as somebody who's always wanted to be independent and also didn't want to be a burden on anyone. But it is a lesson that I keep trying to repeat and learn better because it's just true. And however great you can be by yourself, you can be greater when you ask other people for their help. Hint, hint. Shut up, Adam.

42:23Brené Brown:Okay, last paradox. And I think this is interesting. And Adam, you and I have talked about this before. Perseverance may require leaving.

42:33Angela Duckworth:You know, I'm often asked, when do I quit and when do I grit, right? Oh, I love it because it rhymes. When do I keep going? I don't take credit for that question, but it does rhyme and I let things that rhyme. So when to quit, when to grit. And recently, some folks over at the NFL who do player development for the National Football League said, you know, these young football players, like they quit too soon, you know, like they don't get to start. They know that suddenly they want another team. You know, when they're in college, it's like they don't get enough playtime. They want to like change universities.

43:08Angela Duckworth:Like, how do I get them to grit and not to quit? And so I want to answer you this way, right? I do think there are times where you're in a situation where you're suffering and it's hard and you should stay because that is the nature of the work. That is the nature of the path to where you're trying to go. And there are other times where you should quit. When? When there is a different path, a better path that will get you to where you want to go. And it is maybe a smoother path or a straighter path. So sometimes it is the right thing to quit. But I don't think you should quit only because like, this is painful.

43:48Angela Duckworth:I don't like it. I wish I were there already. I do think those are wrong decisions. but I don't think it's a terrible question to ask yourself, right? Like, should I keep going or should I go somewhere else? And I don't think the answer is always one or the other, but if you can just keep the guiding principle, which is where am I trying to get to? What are my real goals here? And then to try to look with some objectivity at the options. And the last thing I'll say is most people cannot do this by themselves. They need to actually have other people who say, I know you, Brene, and I have some objectivity.

44:32Angela Duckworth:I have some psychological distance on this question. And I think you should do this. If you hear a chorus of opinion from people who know you and who care about you and who also know something about these paths, I would listen to that chorus of opinion. You know, it's not always that you should just be like, oh, you know, everyone's wrong. That's not grit to like never listen to other people. Angela, this is a great resolution of the debate that we started exactly 20 years ago when we met, which was... We've been debating so many things. Adam, where did it all begin? It was the fall of 2006 and we had a great debate about where do you draw the line between healthy grit and escalation of commitment to a losing course of action?

45:15And I think you just resolved it. I think what I just took away from what you just said is we should be slow to abandon our goals, but quick to rethink the path.

45:25Angela Duckworth:We should be hyper adaptable with the how and hyper stubborn about the why. There are many ways to get to what you want to achieve. That's the why, right? Like, what is your purpose? What are you all about? And maybe you do use AI to do it. Maybe you don't. Maybe you do do it with these people. Maybe you need new collaborators. Like you have to be, I think, especially now, hyper adaptive, like so quick to walk away from a dead end. But the destination, you know, the overarching principle of what you're about, like I'm here to communicate, like I'm here to bring out the best and other people like it's to be the best chess player.

46:07Angela Duckworth:You have to have steadfast dedication to your highest level goal. and, you know, infinite ability to walk away from a tactic that's not serving you. I think it's time for you to walk away. Yeah.

46:25Brené Brown:Yeah, we're going to do our rapid fire. But this is why I said hopeful. Because I think what you're describing reminds me so much of C.R. Schneider's research on pathway as an element of hope. that we think a pathway is all internal. High levels of hopefulness require just grit and pathway, but that pathway is equally situational, which I think is so interesting.

46:51Angela Duckworth:I couldn't agree. You mean Snyder of Snyder and Lopez, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the really seminal work on happiness. And I will tell you that in my 40s, when all I knew how to do was try harder, my early 40s in particular, I was not happy. And I got less happy with every extra hour of work. And to really fully embrace the idea of the situation matters and I can change it is something I can't cling to now in my mid to late 50s. I'm working on it. But the more I do, I think the more human I become. You know, like when you see somebody and instead of blaming them for being like not gritty enough, right, not dedicated enough, and you really take a step back and you try to consider that person and their situation.

47:38do it for yourself, do it for others, you know, maybe you'll be more successful.

47:43Angela Duckworth:You'll definitely be more of a human being. Grace. I love grace.

47:47Brené Brown:Okay. Exactly. Two questions in the lightning round. You get to leave any one item in our curiosity shop, no matter how weird it is, how wacky it is. What's one item you'd leave on our shelf in the curiosity shop?

48:00Angela Duckworth:Well, if I could leave a painting from my mom, I would leave the painting that hangs above my bed that I saw every day growing up. And she painted when she was 24. And it's a painting of a mountain and the ocean and some sailboats. And one of the little sailboats represents my mom. And when I used to look at that painting, I thought she was just like a little brave sailboat on her own. But then recently, I've been noticing that there's a flotilla of sailboats, and the sails are full. So she must have had a tailwind. So I think now I look at it and I see my mom. And with increasing sensitivity, I'm appreciating her situation.

48:38God, that's beautiful.

48:39Brené Brown:We may have to just leave it there.

48:41Angela Duckworth:It's a very nice thing in the curiosity shop, I'll just say. It might be the prettiest thing in your curiosity shop. I don't know what else. I bet it will be.

48:47Brené Brown:No question. Thank you for being with us. Thank you, Renee. Let me just hold up this, I was going to say bad boy, but this bad girl right here. Girl boss book. Girl boss book, but also girl love book. Like, yeah, it's just thanks for continuing to make things better for all of us.

49:08Angela Duckworth:Thank you, Renee. Thank you, Adam. Angela, I'm so glad you didn't quit writing this book, which I know you considered many times. But I think this was the path to helping us all see how we can improve our situations. Well, thank you. I hope others enjoy it. push your limits train with precision see the results at equinox that's high performance loving iconic spaces that inspire personal training backed by real data unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and pilates to strength and conditioning elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas steam rooms cold plunges and more everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox.

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50:27Brené Brown:Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Play. Woody! It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part, it's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG. I love that conversation. What about you? Me too. I love being a fly on the wall, watching you interview, and watching you create a situation that brings out the best in other people.

51:08Brené Brown:Oh, that's so thoughtful. No, it's just so fun to watch. You light up when somebody has a mic drop or when there's something thought-provoking. But you're also, I think one of the things I learned through being a little bit, I got to spend a little more time observing in this one than we usually do. And I really love the way you acknowledged what was hard for you about the book. And I think that's something I normally shy away from. And you went right at it. Yeah, it was hard for me because it's when you step back and think for me to achieve what I want to achieve, it requires a letting go that's really scary for me.

51:58Brené Brown:And not just, you know, being in a room that has my kids art in it, but asking for help. And I have a great coach and I have a great mentor. I have to say that I thought about you many times when I was reading this book in a weird way. So she talked about the four elements of situational agency, kind of setting up your space, attracting mentors, choosing your culture. But one of them is picking your peers. And one of the things that our unexpected and new friendship has done for me is, and Steve has pointed this out and so has Barrett. I can talk to you in a shorthand that I can not use with very many people at all in the world.

52:41Brené Brown:Same. You know, I can say to you on a quick text, like, great event, big migraine. And you can say what happened. And I can just say zero house lights all stage. And you're like, why do they do that? We can't, you know, like, you know what that means. you know that they like cooked me on a chicken rotisserie with a light that gave me a migraine. And the worst thing is when you're speaking like you and I speak, maybe if you just get up and do schticks, it's different, but you and I try to engage and change what we're saying depending on how it lands. So I need the house lights at at least 50 % so I can see people's faces.

53:19Brené Brown:I don't need to be lit up like the Empire State Building. But you know what that means. Oh, and I mean, there's so much shorthand there. Also, if you're asking people to engage in a vulnerable conversation, I want sometimes the house lights to go down so that they feel like they can raise their hand and be a little bit anonymous. And how do we then choreograph that dynamic so that the lights are up at the right time and down at the right time? And yeah, there are very few people that would know what I'm talking about if I just brought that up out of nowhere. Yeah, and it's like, that's a technical thing, but there's also, there's just also real conversations.

53:58Brené Brown:Like having you in like my situation world now has really changed the way I think about my work because there's very few people that, while we're opposites in a lot of ways, we do a lot of the same work. Yeah. Like we both taught MBA intensives at the same time this year. And I literally texted you and said, I'm fricking losing it about this. I have never been up against this. And you're like, oh my God, two years in a row I was up against this. Here's how I thought about it. Oh, helpful, okay. And it wasn't like, just grit it down, Brene. You can beat this thing. It was like, I don't know what to do.

54:37Brené Brown:Let me call someone. Let me phone a friend, which made me better. Well, I've experienced that more times than I can count. And it's just, I think that one of the things I really hadn't thought enough about until we talked to Angela and really put her book in this context is, I think the farther we move through career and life, the more idiosyncratic our circumstances are. You go through school and you have a lot of peers who have gone through the same thing. But now it's a smaller and smaller cohort that accompanies us each step. That's true. And finding then the person who, even just to bounce something off of, who's a mirror.

55:18And you can say, oh, wow, you do that? I never would have thought to do that. You can have a team of people who work with you? What?

55:28Brené Brown:Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think I'm not as open to it. I'm more open to it now than I've ever been in my life, which means it's taken like five freaking decades. But that's also, I'm wondering if you come from kind of the volatility that I come from in my family of origin, if you overdevelop grit as a survival mechanism, because as a kid, the situation part does feel outside of your control. Do you know what I mean? And then you have to recalibrate. Yeah, I can see that. I think I've also seen, and I think lived to some extent, And another flavor of that, which is you come from an unstable situation.

56:22And so you try to create just complete stability. And that becomes where you exercise control. And I mean, this is maybe in a mundane way, but as we were talking about arranging your space, and you were describing needing to have Ellen and Charlie's art around you, I was thinking, okay, the mistake I would make is thinking I need to design every situation to be alike because I want it to be consistent and predictable and repeatable. And I started thinking about, there's this body of research that Eric Abrahamson started on how if your desk is a little messy, you tend to have more creative ideas.

57:04And I think it's the same thing as the art. It's the permission to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to try new things. But that's not me. I want to have a neat desk. I want to be ordered and structured and organized. And realizing that I need to put myself in different situations for different goals, that was an aha in this conversation as we were talking.

57:25Brené Brown:I have thought the same thing because there are times where if I'm getting ready to meet with our accounting person, I am Cloroxing down the entire house before that happens. If it's going to involve a spreadsheet, I got to lock in and shit's got to be picked up. I've got it. My house has to look like a spreadsheet. If I'm in a creative, vulnerable chapter, I want my kids art. If I'm writing something else, Annie Lamott has this quote that I love. She said, before, when I first started writing, the house would have to be spotless. And now if I'm inspired, there could be a corpse in the kitchen sink and it wouldn't matter.

58:04Brené Brown:I'm writing. And so I do think it's situation is situational. I know that's very meta, but I do think... One thing that I wanted to say too, when I was prepping for the conversation with Angela, I just have to say that for some folks who are looking at the new book and saying it's an about face from grit. What a terrible indictment of our inability to yes and. Like Jim Collins' tyranny of or, like this idea like, wow, now she's changed her mind. And I was like, did you read the book? Like it's grit and situation. Yeah. And it's building a situation that means you don't have to rely on grit every minute of every day.

58:57Yeah.

58:58Brené Brown:I mean, yes. And what is your take on grit versus willpower? Well, I think I've learned most of what I know about this from Angela. I think of willpower as a capacity and grit more as a motivation. So I guess willpower is the can-do part and grit is the will-do or want-to-do part. Interesting. That's helpful. I am so excited about the sea change that has happened in the research community around willpower. Me too. Yeah, it's just, it's so, as a resource, so finite and so small. And I don't know, I love the book and I love the conversation. Me too. And one other quick thing that I was thinking about is, I was just thinking about this issue of, it's sometimes hard to recognize the power of the situation, but I think anybody who's trained as an athlete has lived it.

1:00:07I was just thinking when Angela was talking about how, like, when I think about trying to hit a personal best on the treadmill running, like, I know how many miles I want to go. I know what my target time is. And I, I think I've controlled every aspect of the situation. Like the gym temperature, the same, it's constant. I'm listening to the exact same playlist. And one day I can do it. And another day I can't, no matter how hard I try. And I look at that and I think, oh, yeah, I didn't have full control over how well I slept the night before. And my circadian rhythm is a little different today than it was yesterday.

1:00:46And my recovery might be different based on the travel that I did in the last few days. And there are all these situational factors that I didn't even think are relevant that influence how far does my grit take me on a given day. And I think that actually, for anybody who's still questioning how important is it to shape your situation, try controlling every aspect of your situation next time you have a simple goal to achieve. And watch how much your performance fluctuates from day to day. And that to me is just personal proof. We need to pay attention to the situational variables that are invisible to us.

1:01:23And I was just thinking about you playing pickleball and how much of that experience you've lived as well.

1:01:28Brené Brown:Oh, my God. It's so weird that you brought this up. I played yesterday and my coach is at this place where I play. And so I saw him walking toward me and I was like, oh, Lord, why is he coming this way? And I was playing open play. So my paddle was stacked, ready to play with, you know, the next time a court came open. And I said, how are you? And I kind of tried to walk by him. He goes, do you have a second? And I was like, oh, what's happening? And so he said, I watched your last game. And he said, I just wanted to check to see if you're doing all right. I was like, beg your freaking pardon.

1:02:09Brené Brown:And he said, I can just tell that something's going on. and literally what happened is I forgot to put my watch on mute. So I got six or seven work texts when I was on the court and I was so distracted. And there I am. It's not like from one game to the next, my skills changed, my experience changed. I have the same number of games behind me. I have the same number of lessons behind me, the same number of drills behind me, but my situation shifted. And in pickleball, unlike tennis, if you take your eye off the ball for a split second, you're going to get hit in the face with it. And I said, yeah, I just, I lost focus.

1:02:49And he said, yeah, I just wanted to check in.

1:02:52Brené Brown:And I was like, but it's good luck controlling every situational variable. Yeah. It's not going to happen. And I think sometimes we just need to be patient around letting the situation evolve. Just one other sports example I was thinking about is my diving coach, Eric Best. Sometimes I would come into practice and I would do a dive that was going well and it just would be off. And I would want to do five or six more reps to try to fix it. And Eric would say, Adam, move on. This is just not working today. Before we overanalyze it, let's see if it's better tomorrow. And then we'll know, is there a change you need to make or do we just need to wait for the situation?

1:03:33to fix itself. And sometimes he would even say, look, you need to take, we're going to not do this dive for a week or a month. I'm like, no, no, I don't want to lose it. And he would say, look, you want to break a bad habit? Stop repeating the bad habit. And just let the situation evolve. And then sometimes you find that you've evolved with it.

1:03:55Brené Brown:Eric is my coach too. Your driving coach is my coach too, because I took a lesson on something I'm trying that's new. And I gave up halfway through a game trying to do it. And again, my coach walked over and said, you got to be willing to be bad to get better. And I said, what? And he said, you got to use this new two-handed thing that you're doing. I'm like, I can't, I don't, I I'm missing. And he's like, I know you're, I know I'm watching them all go into the net. You're going to have to do that 140 times in a game, not in practice, but in a game to get that right. So 20 down, 120 to go. It's your choice.

1:04:32Brené Brown:You want to get better? You've got to be willing to get bad. Bingo. I was like, shit. Because then that changes the situational context from my freaking work all day. So yeah, what a fun conversation. I really appreciate it. Same, same as always. Thank you. Yeah, see you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results.

1:05:09At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

1:05:21Brené Brown:Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney+. Woody! It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz, and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part? It's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney +, rated PG. Hey, y 'all. Kelly Clarkson here with Wayfair. You know my favorite compliment during the holidays? Your house feels so cozy.

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