You are techY podcast

Intro

Ellen (00:00):

You are listening to the You are techY podcast, episode number 95.

Intro (00:10):

Welcome to the You are techY podcast where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness. So you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host, technology learning coach, Ellen Twomey.

Ellen (00:27):

Hey moms, are you trying to break into tech? Are you wondering what skills you really need to get hired and how those skills can be worth $45 an hour? Not that $25 an hour you thought when you first started thinking about going back to work? If so, then the You Are Techy membership is for you. Our combination of courses, coaching, and community come with the mentor support you need to keep moving forward into your tech career. It’s like no other membership available. We have the exact skills employers are looking for. You learn how to maximize your income with portfolio ready skills that hiring managers are seeking. Not to mention the steps you can skip so you don’t find yourself down that endless tech learning rabbit hole. Join me as we walk you step-by-step through the getting hired process in tech. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y dot com. I can’t wait to see you in our membership.

Ellen (01:26):

Whitney Johnson is the founder and CEO of Whitney Johnson’s disruption advisors. She’s walked the disruption socks since the beginning of her career. When she parlayed a secretarial job on wall street into a stock analyst position. Whitney co-created the disruption innovation fund with Clayton Christensen. She’s the host of the wildly successful Disrupt Yourself podcast, where she interviewed steam guests, such as Brene Brown and Bob Proctor. She has a new book, smart growth coming out next year. Whitney has two college aged children and lives in Lexington, Virginia, where her husband grows blackberries, strawberries and raspberries. Whitney, welcome to the show.

Whitney (02:02):

Thank you, Ellen. I’m so happy to be here.

Ellen (02:04):

I’m excited to dive in. As you know, we’ve been over these questions, I have kind of a million for you, so we’ll, we’ll just start off with the most important one. What is your personal disruption story?

Whitney’s Personal Disruption and Growth

Whitney (02:15):

My personal disruption story. All right. Well, it starts with when I was born. No, just kidding. Although that was pretty disruptive, from a career perspective, I studied music in college, played piano. And when I graduated from college, my husband and I moved to New York. So he could get his PhD in biochemistry at Columbia. And once we got to New York, I actually knew I didn’t want to do music. I knew that we needed food on the table, so I needed to go out and get a job, but I was a music major. So the best job I could get was as a secretary. So I go to work as a secretary on Wall Street and I’m going to work every day. I had no idea what Wall Street was when I first arrived in New York, because I grew up in California, like, what’s Wall Street, no idea.

Whitney (03:02):

So I was sitting next to all these up and coming stockbrokers, seeing them and hearing them say things like throw down your pom poms and get in the game. At first I’m super offended when they say that because I was a cheerleader in high school, but after hearing them say that many, many, many times I realized I needed to throw down my pom-poms. So I started taking business courses at night, accounting, finance, economics. And because I had a boss who believed in me, I was able to move from being a secretary to an investment banker. I would not have known to call it this then, but that was really the beginning of me disrupting myself, disrupting myself in the sense of what I believed was possible for me. So from there I did investment banking for several years. Then I got disrupted when my boss was fired and they probably would have fired me as well.

Whitney (03:53):

There had been a merger as often happens on wall street, but I had good performance reviews. I was pregnant at the time, so they just decided to move me (but really they shoved me) into equity research. Now that was a major disruption–turns out, though, that it was a career maker. And that’s one of the things that sometimes happens with disruption when we’re disrupted is that step back can end up being very much a slingshot forward. So I did equity research for almost a decade, and was an award-winning stock analyst. Very good at picking stocks, on spotting momentum. I did that for, as I said, almost a decade. And then I decided it was time to disrupt myself. So, top of my game and realize, I think there’s, there’s something more for me. I want to do something more. I had just read the innovator’s dilemma, from Clayton Christensen.

Whitney (04:40):

I had this notion that this theory of disruption wasn’t just about products, which I was seeing. It made sense as a stock analyst. Oh yeah–wireless is disrupting wireline, but the bigger aha for me was that this is also about people that people can disrupt themselves. So in 2005, I left Wall Street, decided to become an entrepreneur, lots of interesting twists and turns, lots of things that did not work, but eventually connected with Clayton and co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with both him and his son, where we were using the frameworks of disruption. This idea of a silly little thing can take over the world to pick stocks. So we would go long Netflix and short Blockbuster, for example. Fast forward, 2012, I now have (I’m still married) have two children. I’ve been doing this fund and I realized it’s time for me to do yet something else.

Whitney (05:36):

And so that’s when I left being a Wall Street analyst, left investing because I realized I’m actually not as interested in the momentum of stocks as I am in the momentum of people. So I had just written the article, “Disrupt Yourself” in the Harvard Business Review and said, “I want to chase this down. I want to figure this out.” I had written a book Dare, Dream, Do, and said, all right, let’s figure this out and started writing books. And so now what I do, fast forward another 10 years, is: CEO of Disruption Advisors, where we coach, and we train, and we consult with companies on how to grow your people, to grow your company, using that mechanism of personal disruption.

Ellen (06:16):

Wow, well, so it’s really not one story. It’s really just a series of disrupting yourself into becoming an entrepreneur, which is just constantly disrupting yourself. I love it. So this question, I think I’m really excited to ask this because as I was doing my research, I kept thinking about who had influenced you. And so the question is: who have been the two to three most formative mentors in your life? And I say that because it feels like there’ve been quite a few, but I’m really excited to hear you answer who really were the most formative for you.

Whitney (06:49):

So I won’t include my parents cause I think everybody would include their parents. I’m going to do several. The first is the boss that I mentioned when I first started working as a secretary and who gave me a shot. His name was Cesar Baez and I will eternally be grateful for him because to move from secretary to investment banker, it just did not happen. So my story was the working girl story. If you’ve ever seen that movie with Melanie Griffith, that’s what happened. And I had a boss, Cesar Baez, not Harrison Ford, that gave me a shot. So he was a very, very formative mentor. The next most important I would say is Clayton Christensen, no big surprise. Reading his work, studying his work, working with him for nearly seven years, both at work, but also on a number of nonprofit church related projects.

Whitney (07:39):

So really very, very important, I mean, the most important mentor, but more recently, there have been another few that have been important to me, including Marshall Goldsmith. He’s been a wonderful mentor over the past few years, really helping me realize, okay, you need to value it more than you do. Then Alan Malala, who I see you’ve got a book on your bookshelf, has been a lovely supporter and kind. And then the final person I’ll mention for now though, I probably could go on for a few minutes, is Bob Proctor. Bob Proctor, many people will know him from the movie “The Secret,” really focused in and was a groundbreaker when it comes to the human potential movement, starting back in the sixties and your mindset. And he’s been a very important mentor for me of helping me disrupt my mindset. So those are just a few. One of the things I have noticed Ellen, is that the more willing I have become to be mentored, I noticed that I don’t have as many mentors from when I was younger. And I think it’s because I wasn’t as willing to be mentored, but the more I’ve been willing to take feedback from people and to follow their feedback, the more mentorable I have become, I would say, the more mentors I find that I have.

Ellen (08:52):

That’s so beautiful. I love that Bob Proctor is going strong well into his eighties. That is, I am for sure, modeling that attribute. I think that is just beautiful. And then I have a follow-up question on Clay, is he as good of a person as he seems on the outside? Yeah.

Whitney (09:09):

Yeah. He was, he was a really good man. 

Ellen (09:13):

Just a great, great human that I think the world will never forget. I hope. Hope they never do.

Whitney (09:18):

Yeah. Yeah. A really, really, really great man. So I was very fortunate to be able to be in his orbit for the better part of a decade.

Ellen (09:27):

Yeah. That’s beautiful. Well, this one you’ve touched on a little bit, but what we’re going to dive back into how you started your career as a secretary and then became a wall street analyst. You know, I said, how did that happen? And you said one specific: it was Cesar Baez that you said, was your manager. I’m curious about that situation. What about doubters? Were there people who were not accepting of or felt threatened by the fact that that happened? And do you remember any negative feedback in that?

Whitney (09:54):

So I would say, one of the advantages was that right about the time that he promoted me, he had moved firms and brought me along. So it was all new people. And I think that was a very big advantage. What I will say is the biggest doubter was myself. And I’ll tell you a quick story around that. Probably a year or two after he promoted me, we were at a dinner with one of my childhood friends and her soon to be husband and some of his friends from business school, and we were sharing and swapping stories and they had all gone to, I think, very well-regarded business schools. I was a music major. I had not gone to business school. So I felt a lot of shame around that. And so when they asked me my story, I got cagey and a bit coy.

Whitney (10:41):

Well, you know, I did this and I did that and I wasn’t telling them what I did. Enough that, afterwards, one of the friends asked my friend, her name is Liz, said, “so what’s her story there, she’s hiding something” basically. And she, she told him the story, you know, started as a secretary and worked her way up, et cetera. And he said to her, if that were my story, I would tell everyone, and that has stayed with me. So the doubter was me! I’ve noticed, and I have found this was not only true for me, but I have found this in my coaching and throughout my career, is that I will talk to people and when they don’t tell you something and there’s almost always shame associated with it. And yet, when you look and you sort of dig around that shame, there is some gold, there is some amazing “something” that has happened in this person’s life. As a consequence of that “thing” that they feel shame around. It has literally gone from coal into a diamond.

Ellen (11:41):

I love that. That is so great. I love it. It’s just sometimes hard to get to that point, right. Because we’ve got the shame and we’re covering it up and we all do it. We all do it. But I also think like distance, right? I mean, you’ve told this story probably, I don’t know, hundreds of times now, but with the distance, I think the further away you get from it, sometimes that can help with looking at it from that perspective. But when you’re really in it, like you were talking that story, you were right in it, it’s still sometimes hard to see the diamond. You’re still kind of, that shame is feeling like–the coal feels like shame.

Whitney (12:10):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great.

The S Curve of Learning and Growth

Ellen (12:12):

Okay, so time to get into the nitty-gritty of disruption, what’s the S-curve and also how can it help us?

Whitney (12:19):

Okay, what is it and how can it help us? All right. So the S curve, some of your listeners will be familiar with it. It was popularized initially by Ian Rogers in 1962, to help you figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopted. What I have done, the “aha” that I had was that this S curve, and I’ll draw it for you in just a minute, it could be used as a model for what growth looks like. And so if all of your listeners can go with me for just a minute, I want you to use your finger. And I want you to draw a line, the base of that S from left to right. And that is when you start something new, you start a new project, you start a new role, you start a new job. You start a new podcast.

Whitney (13:01):

You are at the base of that. What that S tells you is that initially growth is happening. In fact, it’s happening quite quickly, but it’s not significant enough that it is apparent. And so it feels very slow. It can feel like a slog and feels like you’re not making progress. So you can get discouraged. You can get impatient, how come I’m not, you know, moving along faster. And you’re also struggling because you’re doing something new. So your identity is a little bit in question, you’re not who you were. You’re now this new person, but who is this new person? So it’s gangly and awkward. And so whenever you do something new, you’re at the base of that S, growth is going to feel slow. This is a visual model for thinking about what your growth looks like, regardless of what you’re doing.

Whitney (13:46):

But then you put in the effort and you move into the sweet spot. So that steep, sleek back of the S curve. That feels exhilarating because now it’s hard, but it’s not too hard. And yet it’s not too easy either. And so your neurons are firing that predictive machine in your brain. You’re getting lots of dopamine because you’re increasingly figuring stuff out, you’re getting it right. So those neurons are firing and you just feel the sense of exhilaration. You feel like you’re right where you’re supposed to be. And that is a sweet spot of your growth. Again, it’s hard, but it’s not too hard. So there’s this wonderful equilibrium between the hard and the easy. Then you’re going to reach mastery and that’s, I want you to draw another line, that’s the top of that S curve. And so you can say to yourself, huh?

Whitney (14:32):

I’m at the top of that curve. I’m on top of this mountain. And things are pretty easy now, I’ve figured it out. I know what I’m doing, but because you’re no longer learning, you’re no longer getting the dopamine that comes with learning. You can start to get bored. And so growth has now slowed. So you were slow and then fast and slow. That’s how you grow. You now know, all right, if I stay here, this plateau could become a precipice. So I need to find a way either to jump to a new S curve entirely (and growth curve), or I need to find a way for this to be a summit, but not the summit so that I can keep climbing. Growth is our default setting. This S-curve helps us have this visual, simple model to think about growth. And when we know where we are in our growth, we can increase our capacity to grow. So that’s the S curve model.

Ellen (15:28):

Love it. Oh, that’s great. So, and when we talk about growth, it could be learning anything. So we don’t have to jump jobs just because we’re at the top of the S curve, we just might need different–what? Different responsibilities, or, what would you say about?

Whitney (15:39):

Yeah, well, it can be a new project. It can be a different team configuration. It can be a different role inside of an organization. It can be a new boss, right? When you get a new boss, you’re definitely getting a new S curve. It can be, how are you going to expand your influence across the organization? Very quick story. That is going to be in my next book, that I think really illustrates this, is a fellow by the name of Darrell Rigby. He works at Bain and company. Many of your listeners will be familiar. And he started there straight out of business school. And every couple of years he would get to the top of an S curve and think I need to do something new. But what he would do is say, “how can I make this job, here at Bain, the perfect job?” And so he would come up with something new he wanted to learn. He eventually ran their retail practice. He decided that he was going to figure out agile, and so he’s their expert on agile. And he did this every couple of years. And now by disrupting himself inside of this organization, 40 years later, so four zero years, he is at Bain. 

Ellen (16:44):

Wow. Management consultant, which has like the highest turnover of anything. Oh, that’s super interesting. Okay. So the next question I want to ask, but then we’re going to come back to the book cause we definitely need to talk more about the book. We talked about the S curve, but your podcast and you have a book “Disrupt Yourself.” Disruption–that really is at the heart of, you know, Whitney Johnson’s Disruption Advisers. Why should we disrupt ourselves? And how will we feel when we disrupt ourselves? I mean, it’s going to feel amazing, right? It’s going to be super easy and just so fun. And, roses all the time, right?

Whitney (17:19):

Well, very simply put we disrupt ourselves because when we disrupt ourselves, we’re stepping back from who we are into who we could be, and if we’re not growing, we’re dying. And so that’s why we disrupt ourselves. And to your point, it’s stated in a very facetious manner, it is not easy because when we step back from our identity today, we leave that comfortable perch of who we are today, which we may not like who we are at all, but it’s still comfortable because there’s sort of, we’re in this rusting state. When we do that, we’re going to feel this loss of identity. And we want to feel a sense of who we are. And so it is very uncomfortable and it’s very awkward. And that’s part of why this S curve model and thinking about disruption to me is so important, because then it normalizes the experience that we’re having.

Whitney (18:11):

A very simple example is: I don’t do vacations very well. And earlier this year we decided, okay, we’re going to go on a vacation. We’re going to do this. And I’m going to enjoy this vacation. Because, if you think about it, a vacation is doing something that you don’t always do in a place that you don’t usually do it. And lots of things in between to get there. And doing things with people you don’t always do them with. I mean, you’re not with your family, doing things with your family all day long, unless you’re the lead parent. And so when I said that, I thought, all right, we’re going to go on this vacation and I’m going to feel uncomfortable and awkward. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be on vacation. It doesn’t mean I should be working. It means I’m at the launch point of the S curve. So just stay with the fact: this feels a little bit uncomfortable. Guess what, Ellen, it was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.

Ellen (19:04):

I love it. I love it. I was curious what you meant by “I don’t vacation.” Well, and like, does that mean you don’t go or you go, and it’s not relaxing, or?

Whitney (19:13):

All of it. All of that.

The Seven Accelerants to Personal Disruption

Ellen (19:16):

I love that you’re working on personal disruption of vacation. I think that is, I would like to encourage you to do more of that. That’s great. Okay, so now we’ve got the seven accelerants to personal disruption. This one’s a little bit more in depth, I guess, because, how can we use them to disrupt ourselves into achieving the things we currently think are impossible? Which I’m pretty sure that’s all of my audience–it’s like, when they come to me, they don’t believe. And I believe more than they believe because I’ve seen it done. So it’s pretty easy for me. And I’m sure the same is true for you. So these seven accelerants to personal disruption, I mean, you can list them out or explain which ones you think are most prevalent. I just kind of want to talk about how we can accelerate this personal disruption or maybe why you even came up with the seven.

Whitney (20:05):

Yeah. So I’ll, I’ll just talk through them really quickly so that people have an overview. And what I will say is, as I go through these, if you’re thinking, okay, I really need to learn more about that. As you said at the beginning, I have a podcast and I’ve done an individual episode on each one of these accelerants. So if people are thinking, oh, okay, that went way too fast. 

Ellen (20:27):

As you go through them, I’ll link to those in the show notes so they can link to each of those podcasts. Perfect.

Whitney (20:30):

Perfect. Okay. All right. So the introductory idea around this is podcast episode 80, and then each accelerant is 100, 120, 140, et cetera. All right. So you’ve made the decision that you want to grow because you don’t want to die inside, just a little. And so now you’re going to disrupt yourself, but how do you do that effectively? So you’re on the S curve. You want to move up that mountain. What are the tools that you can employ in order to do that? And so here are the seven tools and, and I’m going to give them in a sequence, but they can be taken out of sequence. So the first one is to take the right kinds of risks. There are two kinds of risks. We tend to think about competitive risk versus market risk, and market risk is at its simplest.

Whitney (21:12):

You just play where no one else is playing. So, you don’t know if there’s an opportunity, but if there is an opportunity, there’s no competition. And when it comes to personal disruption, the simplest way for you to think about it is this idea: how do I play where I have not played before? So for example, do I start a podcast like you did? Like I did, right? How do I expand myself and learn and grow and develop. Encapsulated, I would say the idea of taking on market risk is: amateurs compete and professionals create. So you’re focused on: “what am I creating?” So that’s the first element of personal disruption. And this idea of “do I believe I can do it?” when you are in that place of, “I don’t believe I can do it.” You’re competing with how you think about yourself, with what other people will think about you.

Whitney (21:59):

But when you go into that place of, “I am going to create something,” you start to believe that you can do it. The second one is that in order to do something new, you need to feel strong. And so you want to play to your distinctive strengths, the things that you do uniquely well. One of the challenges with playing with our strengths is that whatever we do well is so intuitive, so reflexive, it’s invisible to us. And so we’re not aware of it. And if people say you do that really well, you’re like, ah, not a big deal. Actually value what we do. You want to identify what your strengths are, but then actually value them. And yes, do hard things, but do hard things that leverage what you do uniquely well. So you now feel strong. You know what your strengths are, you’re willing to play where you haven’t played before.

Whitney (22:50):

And so those two become a flywheel. The third one is to embrace your constraints. As you’re moving along this S curve, you can–we all do it–we think, well, if I had more money or more time or more buy-in or resources, period, then, then I could make a dent in the universe. And yet we know it’s a law of physics that in fact, we need something to bump up against to get friction. And so one of the things that I think about is that our constraints, anything notable that any of us have ever accomplished in our lives, had a constraint. College? When we have graduated from college, if we didn’t have a deadline for papers due and courses to complete, no, we would not have! So anything notable has a constraint. And so for a disruptor, a constraint, it’s not a check on freedom.

Whitney (23:37):

It’s a tool of creation. So that’s number three. Number four is examine your expectations. When you start to hear the word “should” enter into your vocabulary, that means you’re competing with what is rather than creating with what is. So you want to really manage your expectations. Constantly, look for ways to have a little bit of upside. So you get that dopamine. Don’t focus on the downside, cause that’ll have your dopamine drop. And the more you can have that positive cycle of dopamine, the quicker you’ll move along the curve. Number five, step back to grow, step back to slingshot forward. You crouch before you jump, you bring a fist back to punch. Personal disruption involves moving sideways or backwards in order to move forward. And you know, on the podcast, I go through the math of it, if you will, but know that the concept is the step back, catapult you forward.

Whitney (24:28):

Number six is leverage failure. We all fail all the time. And so the question is, how do you use failure as a constraint or a tool creation? And the number seven is to be driven by discovery, to take a step forward, to gather feedback and adapt. Most of us think we’re good at being driven by discovery, but in fact, we are not. And so we like our checklist. What we want to do is yes, checklists are fantastic, but why not have a checklist around, “what am I going to discover today? What am I going to learn today?” I actually, personally, I heard Emma McAdam, who’s a psychologist, say this, and I love it. I like to use checklists to check what I’ve already done in the course of a day, because sometimes I feel like I’m not getting anything done, but I start going: I did this and I did this and I watered the plants and I washed the dishes. I had this conversation all of a sudden it was, “oh, I fed the cats. Look at all these things I did.” I think that’s a great way to use a checklist: to look at what you’ve already done. So those are the seven accelerants of personal disruption. All of those, when employed, allow you to make progress along that curve, they allow you to believe that you can accomplish what you’re setting out to accomplish.

Disruption, Failure, Grieving, and Moving Forward

Ellen (25:35):

I love it. That’s great. Don’t you love it. That of all those, I’m like: oh, failure. That’s the one I want to talk about, I love it. So let’s dive into failure. Because there’s a passage in Disrupt Yourself and I really connected with it. So I’d like to read it and then I’m going to ask you about it. “When I fail, I’m mortified, but I’m also heartbroken. I have envisioned a future in which I would achieve a goal and perhaps be hailed as the conquering hero. And then I didn’t. And I wasn’t. I’ve learned it’s important to grieve.” How do we grieve failure?

Whitney (26:08):

Yeah. So I think there are little failures. You know, the things that we do every day, like, you know, my technology doesn’t work, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when there was something really big and something really important that we wanted and we tried to do, and it didn’t work out in the way that we had hoped, whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s a job, whatever it is. And I think that it is so important that we allow ourselves to grieve because when we’re willing to feel that feeling around it not working, we’re opening ourselves up to feel the feelings that we feel when things do work, we’re expanding our range of emotions and we’re honoring the loss. We’re honoring the fact that it was important to us. And when we’re willing to honor it, not stuff it down and pretend like it didn’t happen, or it wasn’t there, it’s only then that we can move forward. Allowing ourselves to grieve is a really important part of things not working the way that we thought that they would. 

Ellen (27:07):

I love it because for me personally, I just want to move on. Oh no. Okay. It didn’t work out. Move on, move on. Okay. Move, move, move. But like you’re saying, if you don’t take that time, then you really aren’t taking the opportunity to learn from the experience–

Whitney (27:21):

Or even have the experience.

Ellen (27:24):

Right, right. Tell me more about that.

Whitney (27:25):

Well, part of our life, part of being human is to experience this full range of emotions and to feel joy. I know you said you had a baby in the last year. I mean that tremendous joy when your child is born. I mean, we get to feel that. It was also incredibly painful to have a child. So we want to have this range of emotions of being a human being. So when we honor the grief, we are saying: this is important and we’re allowing ourselves to feel, and that opens us up to feel other important things, like love.

Ellen (28:05):

That’s beautiful. Did you find it easy to write about failure?

Whitney (28:10):

It’s actually been very therapeutic. I mean, one of the things that you’ll notice in my work is that it is something I’ve absolutely struggled with. And you’ll notice that over time, my conversation that I’m having around failure has shifted. I mentioned Alan Mulally earlier. One of the things that was really important for me is when I was writing “Build an A Team,” I had a conversation with him and I said, “So what do you think about failure?” And he said, “I don’t.” “No no, how do you think about failure?” “I don’t.” “What do you mean you don’t think about failure?” He said, “Well, whenever something doesn’t work, to me that’s a gem. That’s information. That means I can get better.” And I literally could not comprehend what he was saying. Clearly my shame quotient was a little higher than Alan Mulally’s!

Whitney (29:06):

That was so important and so valuable for me because I thought, all right, here’s a person that I really admire, who is clearly very resilient. He’s able to have something not work and just bounce back from that. So, I think my shame that I feel when something doesn’t work has diminished significantly and I am more and more in that place, and again, eating my own cooking, walking my own S-curve talk is allowing myself to be in this place of: okay, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m not actually failing. I’m experimenting, I’m learning, and giving myself the grace to do that (and I hope giving myself, or giving people around me that same grace.)

Ellen (29:46):

Don’t you think that’s what Alan was saying? He doesn’t ever think about it as failure. It’s just learning. Or it’s the same experience, the same literal experience that any of us could have, but he just frames it differently?

Whitney (29:56):

It’s a totally different framing, which is so powerful to me, and what a great way to live. Right? Because then we can take all of the experiences of life. That’s one of the challenges at that launch point of the S curve. When your identity is in question, we start to hustle, as Bernie Brown would like to say, we start to try to perform. But as soon as we perform, we stop learning. So you want to be in this place of experimentation, of learning, what’s working, what isn’t–then you’re going to move up that S curve faster. You’re not trying to perform, and  in that mode, there actually isn’t failure. It’s just figuring stuff out. 

Ellen (30:35):

What does she mean by performance? Like lack of authenticity, like you’re coming at it from–

Whitney (30:38):

Yes. Yeah. So, I don’t know that she says performance–David Peterson, who formerly was the coach at Google calls it performance–but it’s that hustling of, I need to make sure–let me give you an example. Cause I think this will illustrate it really beautifully. It’s embarrassing for me, but it will illustrate better, in service of the conversation. So probably about a year ago, I was doing a coaching demonstration for a number of our disruption advisors. I felt like I needed to be good, so that they would be impressed, like, “Yes, our fearless leader. She is awesome.” Well, I started trying to perform and thinking about: what are they thinking? Do they think I’m doing a good job? And so I started to perform, I started to think about myself, not actually the coaching and not actually the teaching and the learning.

Whitney (31:29):

And so after that conversation was over, I had a conversation with one of my coaches (because coaches need coaches). Her name is Carol Kauffman. She’s at the Institute of Coaching at Harvard. And she said, “Run it as an experiment.” She said, “Whenever I do a live coaching demonstration, this is what I do.” She says, “Hey, everybody, I’m about to do this coaching demonstration. And what I can tell you is that there are going to be times when I do this demonstration and you were going to say, ‘wow, she is brilliant. She is such a good coach.’ And there are going to be other times where you’re like, ‘wow, she is not good at this at all,’ but we’re running an experiment. So what I want you to do is as I do this, just see what you learn.” So I did that the next time I was having this coaching demonstration. All the pressure was gone because it was all about the experiment. It was all about them learning. It was all about me learning. It wasn’t about me. It was about this thing that we were doing, the ego was out of the equation. Where your identity–this is not a referendum on your identity. It’s off the table. You’re just focusing on: what are we all learning together? That’s the difference between performing and learning.

Ellen (32:44):

I love it. Do you think that you–so that’s a recent example–but do you think that you can get better at that the more experiences you have?

Whitney (32:55):

Oh, a thousand percent.

Ellen (32:56):

So was it higher–to even go into more depth–was it a higher performance value? Because this was the first time you were running this exact thing, the way you were teaching it. Do you think it was harder to overcome the performance as opposed to something like your podcasts that you’ve done hundreds of times?

Whitney (33:12):

Oh yeah. When it’s brand new. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cause when you think about it, you know, the very first podcast, you’re going to feel a lot more, I mean, it’s a lot newer, right? Once you’ve done hundreds of podcasts interviews, yeah, it might not be, you know, as good, but you’re in the sweet spot and you’re figuring it out. From an identity perspective, the stakes are not as high. I will tell you that when I interviewed Simon Sinek (and this was probably a year and a half, two years ago), because I was so impressed by him, I started to go into performance mode. 

Ellen (33:49):

Simon Sinek! He’s not even the biggest name I would pick from your podcast. Oh, that’s hilarious.

Whitney (33:53):

Yeah, I did that. And so I thought, you know what? I got to call this out. So in my afterward, I said, “Did you notice what I just did there?” And so, you know, I’m learning. And again, then you pull the shame out of it. When you just call out, “Hey, here’s where I just did,” then you stop feeling shame. You’re just like, “Oh, here’s what I learned. Did you notice how I did that?” And then everybody else learns too.

Ellen (34:17):

I love it. Okay. We’re almost done. One more failure thing. I love sticking with failure. I think probably selfishly, because it’s been such a hard thing for me. I grew up as an athlete and there’s so much around winning, and I really like to win. I associate failure with loss. And, what’s so funny is, my entire career has been centered around learning. I love learning. So I’m working on this reframe of failure as learning, which clearly the best people do. I mean, I’d love to, if you’d like to flip the switch and just do it, I’d love it. But I find it to be this thing that I have to keep working on, and have to keep going back to, and I love your comment about the ego. 

Whitney (35:02):

Wait, before we go on, what kind of athlete? What did you play? What sport?

Ellen (35:07):

A lot. So basketball, volleyball, softball, football, swimming.

Whitney (35:11):

Oh, do you have a favorite? (Ellen: “Basketball.”) Okay. But it is interesting. It goes back to the identity piece of: if you’re not winning, you’re losing. How do you completely rewire that? So it’s a great, wow, what a great challenge for you! But if you can crack it, then you can help your clients crack it.

Ellen (35:29):

Right. Hopefully, and it’s not even true because one of the winningest coaches ever, John Wooden, the book is The Score Will Take Care of Itself. Like, his whole strategy is not about winning. So, it’s just a story, right? It really is just a story, but you’ve gotta be able to come to terms honestly, with not achieving goals. And that’s what I found, you know, entrepreneurship I think is such a brilliant thing to teach you more about yourself than anything, don’t you think?

Whitney (35:55):

It’s a lab. It’s a daily laboratory.

Learning from Failure Without Letting it Break Us

Ellen (35:57):

Yes, absolutely. Okay. This will tie right in. And so here’s the passage: ”The person who suffers loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working through and learning from this loss. We often think of loss of a marriage or a loved one, but there’s also the loss we feel when a professional dream, even a small one, is dashed. So don’t hide your failures, much as much as you may want to bury them deep in the earth where they will never be seen. (I do). Acknowledge them and share them with someone you trust.” Here’s my question. How do we learn from failure without letting it break us?

Whitney (36:31):

Well, I think it’s much of what we’ve been discussing already. I think we start to learn by becoming aware. As I’ve talked about the journey that I’ve had with it, this reconciliation. The journey that you’re having, of rewiring your brain around it. I think we both would assert that over the past decade of our life, failure breaks us less than it used to. And so, I think the more aware of what it is, the more aware of–y’know, it’s not failure that limits our ability to disrupt and move forward. It’s shame, and we can do that inner work of separating out what we’re doing from our actual core identity. That is not a referendum on us. And so, the more aware we become of it, the more adaptable we become of it. So we’re able to talk ourselves through it and use our executive functioning skills to rewire our brains around that.

Ellen (37:28):

Hmm. That’s good. I think that’s one of the fears that I see out there and in my community and with my associates. And so I want–that’s one of the reasons I think people don’t go for things they’re like, I might break. I’m afraid I’ll break. So, I love knowing that, well if we do, then we have a solution to offer. 

Outro (37:48):

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