Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True. I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources, such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Nataly Kogan. Nataly Kogan is an entrepreneur, a speaker, and an author on a mission to help millions of people cultivate their awesome human skills by making simple, scientifically backed practices part of their daily life. Nataly immigrated to the United States as a refugee from the former Soviet Union when she was 13 years old. She created Happier, a company whose award-winning mobile app, online courses, and Happier at Work–training programs have helped more than a million people improve their emotional health.
Nataly is a sought-after keynote speaker and has appeared in hundreds of media outlets, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. With Sounds True, Nataly has released the book Happier Now and a new book called The Awesome Human Project: Break Free from Daily Burnout, Struggle Less, and Thrive More in Work and Life. A super achiever, Nataly herself went through what she calls an avalanche burnout, not just a little burnout, but a big, accumulated burnout that made her pause her entire life and her career in order to recover.
The Awesome Human Project is what came from her recovery, everything she learned about how we can live in a way that enables us to thrive while we give all of our gifts energetically to other people. Here’s my conversation with awesome human Nataly Kogan.
I’m excited to talk to you, Nataly about your new book and the body of work that’s underneath it, The Awesome Human Project and becoming awesome humans. But before we get there, as a form of introduction, I’m wondering if you can share with our listeners a bit about you. I understand that you came to the United States as a teenager, as a Russian Jewish refugee. And what I’d love to know more is a refugee, a refugee from what? What were the circumstances of your immigration to the United States?
Nataly Kogan: I’m thrilled to be here at Tami and to have this conversation. And I’m thrilled about this as a first question. I actually talk about this in the book. I grew up in what was then the former Soviet Union, which is what we now call Russia. Being a Jew in the Soviet Union at that time—so we’re talking about seventies and the eighties before the fall of communism—it was a really challenging experience. There was a policy of official government persecution of Jews.
As a Jew, you were actually considered a second-rate citizen, and it was accepted in various institutions and between people to discriminate against Jews. Examples of that were things like quotas for admission to universities and medical schools. Only a certain number of Jews could get in per year. It was really hard to get jobs as Jews. It was perfectly fine to hear slurs against Jews in the street, and that was kind of accepted.
In my life the way it showed up was I was a total geek—I still am. I love to study. I love to do well. But as a Jew, I could not have the highest grade on a test or an exam, for example. So, if I had the highest grade in the class, my grade would be lowered to match other people. So, I danced with the dance troop. I was a dancer since I was five, but I wasn’t allowed to travel outside of Leningrad, which is St. Petersburg now, where I grew up.
As a Jew, even though I was a lead in this children’s youth company, when they went to perform in different republics or outside the city, I couldn’t go because I was Jewish. That is why we left, and I was 13 at the time, so I was very much old enough to understand what was going on. It was and became—and still is—the formative experience of my life.
When people ask me about, “What was it like to come to the US as a refugee?” I say, “It’s not an event; it’s a life experience.” To this day, it affects all of my choices, who I am, my decisions.
But the logistics around it, if you would—we left in the spring of 1989. It was me and my parents. (I’m an only child.) And we were by law allowed to bring two suitcases per person and $600, and that was it. Everything else had to stay behind; it was considered government property. We gave it to our family and friends, and we spent two and a half months in refugee settlements that the Americans had set up in Italy and in Austria, applying for permission to come to the US as refugees.
My parents wrote this very thick affidavit of all the ways that we were persecuted. And I remember—this is such an eerie memory—my parents being really fearful that we wouldn’t get in because ours wasn’t as bad as some other people. My dad came and he said, “Wow, I just found out this one family, the father actually got beat up in the street and we didn’t, so I’m not sure we’ll get in”—which is a surreal conversation to be having.
About 30 percent of Jews were being accepted that way at the time. About 450,000 Russian Jews came through those refugee settlements in 1989 and ‘90, which is when we came. And obviously we were incredibly lucky and grateful to get permission to enter the US as refugees. My American dream started in public housing in the projects outside of Detroit, in a town called Ypsilanti, where we were given food stamps and welfare and a tiny place to start our American dream.
TS: You said, Nataly that this was the formative event, circumstance, context of your life, and that makes sense to me. I’m curious—how? How did this form you and what were the impacts? You probably discover them your whole life.
NK: Yes, very much so. And again, it’s something I—I’m 46. I just turned 46 a few days ago. And I would say, in the last couple of years, I had a lot of clarity and a lot of peeling back the layers that went into this book, but a couple ways that it affected me. One was, at 13—I have a 17-year-old daughter—and I think at 13 you’re in this very tender place where I’m not sure you want to move across the street, right?
Routine is good, knowing your friends are good. And my world and my identity just disappeared. And here I was, the only, I’d say, identity at 13 that I had was I was a good student. All of a sudden here I was in remedial classes because I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know what people were saying, feeling like an idiot most of the time, which for me meant really shutting down. And I’m a pretty open person. I have a lot of energy and I just closed in.
One of the things as part of that, that’s taken me 32-plus years to untangle is I decided that I needed to hold in all my emotions because I couldn’t really talk about them with my parents. They had their own battles to fight. My dad was trying to find a job so we would have food, right? Where do emotions come in? I would say we’re very loving family, but I didn’t grow up with any kind of tools to talk about emotions because that was a luxury. You just fought the battle.
One of the biggest impacts was I just stuffed it all down, all the emotions of anxiety and confusion. I just said, “You know what? I just got to stuff it down.” And it took 25 years for that to explode out of me, which led to a really severe burnout and breakdown. That was the biggest impact. There are many others, including positive ones, I do want to say.
We talk about resilience a lot these days, I’ve given a lot of talks on resilience. I think the experience of being a refugee, of just being new to everything gave me this a skillset, because I think of resilience as a skill to just roll up my sleeves and figure out how to get through difficult things. My daughter often says, “I’m not sure I’ve heard you ever say, Mama, that something is too difficult.” And it’s not that I don’t perceive things as difficult, but it was such a difficult experience that ever since then when a challenge arises, I just naturally go, “OK, well, let’s figure it out.”
I think those are two huge impacts. And one more, if I may mention, is it created this sense in me that it was me against the world, because I felt really alone. As I mentioned, my parents are very loving, but they were trying to get food on the table, right? So all of a sudden I was the adult. In fact, I was helping my dad write his resumé and go to the bank to ask how to open an account because I was learning English faster.
While as a teenager you might think it’s fun to be a parent of your parent, it’s a very, very destabilizing experience to not have any cover. So, I felt not just lonely but alone. And I adopted this mentality of a lone warrior. It was me against the world, and whatever I was going to achieve in my life I was going to do it on my own and it had to be tough and I had to keep all my emotion inside. And that, while it helped me achieve a lot of things, was incredibly damaging to myself, to my emotional health, and I think to some relationships that I had. And again, it’s only in the last few years that I feel I’ve been able to fully face that.
TS: You mentioned stuffing your emotions down, and yet in The Awesome Human Project book, you talk a lot about emotional fitness. You even put in the book a five-week emotional fitness challenge. I realized I don’t know if I know what emotional fitness is. When you think about a term like “physical fitness,” it’s part of the vocabulary. People go, “Yes, I know that person, they’re really physically fit. Look at them.” There are ways we can test how much can they walk up that hill without huffing and puffing and falling down, et cetera. What are the telltale signs of emotional fitness, and how do you define that term?
NK: By the way, I just want to say it’s a great question. I don’t think I knew what emotional fitness was until I started to write this book and realized I want to define this skillset that I feel I’ve gained and that’s helped me. The way that I define emotional fitness is as a skill, and it’s really, really important to articulate this. It is a skill, it’s not something, just like physical fitness. It’s not like some people are stronger than others; when you live healthier, when you’re active, your physical fitness improves.
It’s a skill we can all improve. But the way that I define it is as a skill of creating a more supportive relationship with yourself, your thoughts, your emotions and other people so that you can struggle less through whatever challenges arise. And to me, at the core of emotional fitness is this more supportive relationship with ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions and other people.
And again, I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know if this is a psychologically correct definition, but it is a definition that seems most accurate to me. And again, just like physical fitness, you know when you’re physically fit, right? We all know. I was just on vacation for a while, so I haven’t been keeping up with my yoga; and I did a yoga class last night, and I was like, “Oof, wow, this is tougher than it was two weeks ago.” Right? So we know when we haven’t been practicing something.
I think we all know the kind of relationship we have with ourselves and our thoughts and our emotions if we’re honest about it. And emotional fitness is all about creating that more supportive relationship because when we do, we have the capacity, we have the energy and the ability to get through inevitable life challenges with less struggle and by creating a more positive impact on others. That’s how I think about it.
TS: Interestingly this idea that we can struggle less when we’re emotionally fit, when challenging things happen. And one of the first practices that you introduce in The Awesome Human Project is this notion of struggle awareness. So, let’s say someone listening says, “OK, I can become aware of the fact that I’m struggling in this part of my life, struggling in that part of my life, how does this struggle awareness help me? I start with awareness, but how am I going to struggle less?”
NK: It’s a great question. I love that you’re bringing up a practice, because as you know, for my work, it’s all about these tangible ways to practice improving these skills. This isn’t about some dramatic outside changes. So, just a couple words about this idea of struggle versus challenge. Again, we talked about my background. I grew up believing the opposite. I just want to be really honest about that.
I grew up believing that when life is challenging, you own the struggle. You feel it, you talk about it, that’s how I learned in my family to express love. Someone’s struggling, I struggle with them, right? So, it’s taken quite a shift. The difference between challenge and struggle, challenge is on the outside; we all have challenges in so many different ways. Challenges in our home, in our personal lives, people we love, and our work, et cetera. Not much we can do about challenges. They come up. We don’t have control when or how.
Struggle is on the inside. And struggle is something we have a choice about because struggle comes from our mindset about this challenge and our relationship with our thoughts about it. Our own emotions, our supportive relationship or not with ourselves. And so struggle awareness is a practice of not just becoming aware of where I’m struggling in my life, but it’s more going inside and asking yourself, “How is the way that I am thinking about this challenge—” Maybe it’s a challenge in my personal life, maybe it’s a challenge at work. “How is the way that I am thinking about it, how might it me to struggle more?”
This is where we get a little bit into, as what I call in the book, an unborn neuroscience lesson, but something that I think is really important to mention. The thoughts that we have are not objective, right? Our brain—I say this in the book—doesn’t care if we’re happy, if we’re sad. Our brain doesn’t care about how much we struggle. Our brain’s number one job is to protect us from danger. And it’s a pretty good thing, because being alive is wonderful. But as the result of that, the brain has developed certain characteristics that actually increase our struggle.
A few that I talk about are, for example, our brain has a negativity bias. So, whatever challenge we might be experiencing, our brain overfocuses on all the things that are wrong or could go wrong and ignores anything that might be OK or even meaningful or joyful or kind in our experience.
The other thing to know about our brains is our brains hate uncertainty. Uncertainty is the hardest thing for the human brain to handle. So, whenever we’re experiencing a challenge, usually challenges come with uncertainty, right? We’re not quite sure how this is going to work out. Our brain goes into overdrive, creating really dramatic negative stories about this challenge that are actually making us struggle more, that are causing us more stress. So, the practice of struggle awareness is becoming aware. Well, the way that I’m thinking about this challenge, on the outside, whatever it might be, is it really tainted by my negativity bias? Am I overfocusing on everything that’s wrong and ignoring some things that are OK which will give me strength to get through it?
Is my brain making up a lot of really dramatic stories about how this is going to go and thinking about them and ruminating on them all the time is actually causing me a lot of stress and preventing me from moving forward? That’s what the practice of struggle awareness is. It’s about becoming aware of how we are thinking about the external challenge and whether those thoughts are actually causing us more struggle and then course correcting. Those are the other practices I offer in the book.
Once you become aware, awareness is really powerful because it gives us choices. Once we become aware that “You know what, I’m just ruminating on the worst possible scenario. That is not helpful to me. What would be helpful?” That’s another practice that I offer, which is all about editing our thoughts. But that’s the essence of struggle awareness.
TS: Early in The Awesome Human Project, you describe that we can courageously talk back to our brains. And I was like, “This is”—and I’ll use the word—“This is awesome. I need to courageously talk to my brain about all kinds of things.” But then this question emerged, and I kind of have a felt sense of the answer, but it’s hard to articulate. So, I wanted to ask you, who is it that’s talking to my brain? Is this some wise part of me that is outside my brain? Help me understand that.
NK: Great question. […] It’s a question five years ago I wouldn’t have had the answer to. And I just have to say Tami since we’re having this conversation, so many of the authors that I’ve read, who Sounds True has published, have helped me understand this distinction. But the way that I think of our brain is a little child. A little child, if left to their own devices, they go from one place to another. One time they’re crying, the next time they’re laughing. So I think of the brain as the little child and that person, that being who speaks back, who talks back to the brain and auto corrects. I think of it, as you said, it’s this wiser part of us. I often think of it as the grandparent, just to give a really tangible analogy.
TS: No, it’s great. Because I think we can all feel this even if philosophically it might bring questions up about how many of me are there, what model do we want to apply? But I think we can feel what you’re saying, so keep going.
NK: Yes. It’s the grandparent. I was very lucky when I was growing up in Russia, my dad’s parents lived next door and during the day they really took care of me after school. And my mom’s parents lived in the South of Russia. I spent every summer with them, and they came with us. My grandpa only died last year. He lived till 96. And so I’ve grown up very grateful. Till I was 45, I had grandparents and I think we all know that experience, even if we didn’t have our own grandparents, but a grandparent, you come to them with your problem and the first thing my grandma and grandpa would always do is they would say, “Natashenka”—that’s my Russian name—”just sit for a moment, let me make some tea, and then we’ll talk.”
Immediately you just feel this centering. Like, OK, I’m not just going to run along with these frantic thoughts of, “This is going to be bad, this is going to be awful. You’re awful. This won’t ever work.” The grandparent has a little bit of a distance between them and your thoughts. And the other thing that I think is really important, you mentioned it, is that part of us that talks back to our brain, it does it with kindness and compassion.
Our brain is part of us. When you talk to a little child who’s having a temper tantrum, you don’t scream at them. You don’t yell at them. You know that doesn’t help. We’ve all done it, let’s just say. When my daughter was little and she’d have a temper tantrum, I’d get so frustrated at some point I’d yell. But that doesn’t help. You know what does help? When I get on the floor with her and look at her and I’d say, “I love you. I’m here. If you want to talk about it, let’s talk about it. If you just want to cry with me, let’s cry.”
There’s a calmness that happens when we approach those thoughts that I just talked about it from that grandparent place, with compassion and kindness, but also an understanding that those thoughts are not truth. There’s a way to shift for them to be more helpful to us. So that’s how I think about it. The little child and the grandparent.
TS: There’s a quote from the book; you write, “Our stories can become our shields, and that’s why it takes courage to put them down.” You talk about not just talking to our brains, editing the narratives we’ve created, but that we have to do so courageously. So tell me, what’s the courage that’s required here?
NK: Yes. I didn’t realize when I began to write the book and think about these things that I’d be writing so much about courage, but it is one of the five qualities of awesome humans. And the courage is necessary because our stories about ourselves can get really comforting and comfortable. I mentioned one of mine, right? I had the story about myself that I was this tough cookie and everything I was going to achieve, I was going to fight for it myself and I was this lone superwoman. That was my story, Tami, for 25 years.
It was safe in a way because that’s what I was used to. And look, I was accomplishing all these things. When I went through a really, really terrible burnout and breakdown, I had to find the courage to actually poke some cracks in that story and to acknowledge that, well, actually there were people in my life of who were supporting me. I wasn’t alone, and the world isn’t this confrontational place where everything is a battle. A lot of the battles I was creating internally in my mind. And courage is required, because when I was putting down that story, I didn’t yet know what my true self was. I was just hanging onto this shield, right?
Because being this tough lone warrior, what did it create? It created, I was always I think, a pretty nice person, but I was always pretty sharp, very quick. I valued efficiency and results above anything else. I didn’t have a lot of patience. I didn’t have a lot of compassion because the way we treat ourselves is how we treat others. So, the courage is in putting down those stories or those narratives and being open to creating something that is more supportive of yourself, that is closer to how you truly are, and that does require courage. It’s scary to be more honest with yourself and others about who you are.
TS: You mentioned there are five qualities of awesome humans, courage being one of them. Tell me, what is this whole Awesome Human Project anyway? What does it mean to be an awesome human? And then, if you will, what are all five of these qualities?
NK: Yes. At the core of this—I loved when you said, Tami, at the beginning, “the body of work”—the place where I got to was this recognition that there is an awesome human inside each of us. And what I mean by that is very specific. It doesn’t mean we’re all perfect; none of us are. It doesn’t mean we don’t have ways to grow or improve. We all do. But I believe that each one of us has this really unique and meaningful capacity to create meaning, to be a positive impact on people we love, on our work and on our world.
We all have this capacity, but the thing is, things get in the way. And the first thing that gets in the way is our brain. It gets in the way with these limiting beliefs, with these incorrect stories by making us struggle more, and so we cover up that awesome human capacity. And the reason I wrote this book and the reason it has the five-week awesome human challenge is to help you learn the skills and the qualities to break through those limiting beliefs, to struggle less during challenges so you can bring your awesome unique capacity to create meaning and reach your purpose and be a positive impact on others.
So that’s what I mean by we’re all awesome humans. We’re awesome, but we’re also humans. So, we have to practice. And so, in the book, I talk about the five qualities of awesome humans and then the five emotional fitness skills, and that’s a challenge. So, the five qualities I talk about, the first is emotional openness and awareness. We cannot improve our emotional fitness if we’re not first aware of our emotions, as you and I have talked about. And then being actually open about our articulating our emotions to others, which is challenging, and I offer some practices to do that. That’s the first quality.
We’ve talked about courage, both courage to talk back to our brains when they’re causing us to struggle more and the courage to shift or drop some of those unhelpful narratives. Leadership is another awesome human quality. I went down quite a rabbit hole when I was working on the leadership chapter, learning about what it truly means to be a servant leader, which I think I misunderstood for most of my career as a leader. And so many people do.
Being a servant leader is not about sacrificing yourself for others. And so the leadership quality is all about, the way I define a leader is you’re a leader if you positively impact other people’s capacity to thrive. And that definition’s become really meaningful to me. I work with a lot of leaders in my work and the kernel of that is you cannot positively impact others if you don’t first positively impact yourself because we all share our energy and emotions with others. Leadership is a quality of awesome humans.
TS: I’m going to interrupt you here, just for a moment—
NK: Please.
TS: —on these two points: emotional openness, and awesome humans are leaders. A question came up for me. You use this image, and I think it’s very powerful, how we’re each walking around with what you call an emotional whiteboard, right in front of our chests—whatever our emotions are. I think that’s true. And, as a leader, sometimes I’ve gotten feedback—“You know, Tami, you should be happier, you should be more positive, you should be more this.”
I’m like, “Look, I’m just going to be truthful. You know you can count on me. Sometimes I’m in a great mood; sometimes I’m not.”
“Well, leaders, Tami, they’re the people that [go], ‘Rah rah,’ and cheer everybody up.
I was like, “Well, look, I don’t really know how to do that.” There are many questions in this—which are, basically, how emotionally open should we be, when we’re in a work environment leading other people?
NK: Tami, I’m so glad you brought this up. I have the opposite experience. In my career I began to lead teams from an early part of my career with no concept of what I was doing—just to be really open to that. And I actually adopted the mindset that, “Yes, as a leader, I have to be positive and confident.” I always, when I speak about this on stage, I say if you Google images of me from 15 years ago, you get this like almost like a stock photo of Natalie being a positive and confident leader. I actually believed that no matter how I felt inside, I had to show up to my team, pretend everything was awesome. The word “awesome” was the most overused word in my vocabulary. Just point the way forward.
It was, again, only when I went through a really severe burnout and breakdown that I recognized how damaging that was for my teams. Because the truth is we cannot actually pretend to each other, this emotional whiteboard that I talk about. As human beings, one of the things we’re best at is sensing each other’s emotion.
While I always thought I could just pretend that everything was amazing when it wasn’t, my team knew I wasn’t being truthful. But the thing about our emotional whiteboards, other people see them, but they see them through fuzzy glasses, so they sense something is up, but they don’t have the context. So, by pretending to be positive as a leader when I wasn’t, I actually, Tami, created a lack of trust and a lack of psychological safety on my team, because I’d show up with my fake smile, pretending to be this energizer, when I actually had a lot of self-doubt or just wasn’t feeling that upbeat; and my team could sense I wasn’t being truthful, but they didn’t know what was going on. So that caused them to struggle more. They had to waste their energy trying to guess like, “What actually is going on? Why isn’t she saying?” All the things I mentioned about the brain, that’s what happened in their brain. So, because they didn’t have the facts, they started to, “Wait, is she acting like this? Is there something big she’s not telling us? Is the company in trouble? Am I in trouble?”
In the book I talk about this tense boss scenario, we’ve all been in it. When you’re meeting with your boss and your boss who’s usually pretty effusive is acting off. The first thing you think of is, “Oh my God, what did I do?” And then you start to spin those stories. And I say all this because I had the experience of learning how damaging it was to pretend to be positive when I wasn’t to my team. And a lot of people didn’t enjoy their jobs because of it. I didn’t create a great environment of us working together and I was leading a startup.
I share this in the answer to your question of how open we should be at work. The reality is you already are sharing your emotions with others. And I know that I work with leaders, I have leadership programs I lead. I work with leaders and companies and this question comes up all the time, Tami. “Well, it’s scary. I don’t think I can share with my team that I’m feeling uncertain or that I’m feeling down. Don’t they just expect me, as you said, to just be confident?”
More and more, if you look at the research, the most successful leaders who are most trusted by their teams, whose teams are most effective, they’re leaders who actually are open about their emotions. They give context to how they’re feeling, and they also create a way for their teams to be open about their emotions. So, I just want to say really one thing. And I have a practice in the book for how to actually talk about your emotional whiteboard. But I just want to say to everyone listening, being open about your emotions doesn’t mean that you have to open up your heart and constantly talk about how you’re feeling. The question that I want you to ask is, “What would be helpful for my team or this person that I’m talking to at work? What would be helpful for them to know about how I’m feeling for this to be the best interaction?”
As an example of that, of something I frequently do with my colleague, who’s my right hand, Debbie. If I haven’t slept well or something is going on in my life, I’ll shoot her a quick email. We live in two different cities, and I’ll just say, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I’m super cranky today because stuff going on at home, I’m fine, but that’s what’s going on. I just want to let you know.”
And that way she doesn’t have to spend energy trying to figure out, “Why is Nataly being so weird today?” And she can actually have an opportunity to say, “Oh, well, is there anything I can do to help?” Sharing your emotional whiteboard is not about telling all the things that are going on, it’s just maybe one sentence that you can give context to other people. And again, for me, what helps is ask this question, “What would be helpful for my team to know about how I’m feeling for this to be the best possible interaction?”
TS: It’s helpful to have the example and to think about how to do it skillfully and that perhaps someone could say something like—I’m going to test this out on you—“I’m going through a difficult time with my partner right now, and I don’t really want to talk about the details. But I want to let you know that what I’m going through right now doesn’t relate to our work environment. It’s something happening within my marriage.” I’m just bringing up some example or something that’s it’s not true in my personal case, but like some opportunity.
NK: That’s a great example.
TS: Because I don’t want to talk about it with the people I work with. It’s none of their business, etc., but I do want to cue people in to what’s happening for me. So, there are ways to do it that protect you, obviously.
NK: There are ways to do it. And I just want to share, because I love practices and examples. I want to share another example—not you, not me, a third party. So, this is an example. So, Carrie Palo Mara McGrath is one of the physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is right outside of Boston and where I live. And Carrie is someone who’s been leading their COVID team. And I say this is a person with a very, very stressful leadership job.
She went through one of my leadership programs learning how to share her emotional whiteboard. She emailed me other day, so I just want to share it. I think we put this into the book. But her example was, she said, “Oh my God, I just want to tell you, this was like a life changer.” She said her nanny was late that morning, so she had to take her daughter to her preschool. And so, she was running late for her rounds with her residents.
She said, “And I was coming into the round.” She said, the quote she used, “I knew I was coming in hot.” She said, “I ran in and they’re all kind of looking at me scared because I’m coming in hot. They think it’s something they did,” she said. And I was just like, OK, I’m just going to practice right now. And she said, she looked at them and she said, “All right, you guys, I had a crazy morning, everything went off the rails and I haven’t had my coffee. So that’s what’s going on, has nothing to do with you.”
And then she said, “And what would really help me is if we could just pull together and have the best rounds.” She said she has never had better rounds before, that she felt there was a collective exhale. As soon as she said—it was one sentence, Tami—she just said, “I had a crazy morning that’s why I’m like this.” She said everyone just exhaled and was able to focus their attention on having great rounds together.
I love sharing that example because I think few of us have jobs as stressful as a doctor on the front lines of COVID. So, if Carrie can practice it in the moment, I think we can all practice it too. And again, it’s just what would be helpful for other people to know, to have a little bit of context for why I might be acting this way. It’s one sentence from your emotional whiteboard. You don’t have to share all the personal details. I think it is one of the most powerful practices that I share. It’s been—I was going to say life-changing, and I was like, “Is that grandiose?” but no—it’s been life changing in my work and life as well.
TS: Well, it’s interesting because in the work world now, one of the themes that I keep reading about is how many people are suffering from various levels of burnout. And you make this connection that when we’re not emotionally honest with other people, I think you call it surface acting. That when we’re surface acting at work, it actually contributes to burnout. So, can you explain that connection? How does surface acting contribute to burnout?
NK: Of course. By the way, surface acting, this is an existing psychological term, and it is something a lot of people suffer from, especially in what psychologists call customer-facing jobs: customer service folks, doctors, nurses, teachers. People who have an expectation of serving others. They suffer a lot from surface acting, but we all do.
The reason—and again, just as I shared before, I surface acted for most of my career, again, thinking I was doing the right thing. The reason it’s one of the leading causes of burnout is it takes a tremendous amount of emotional labor to pretend to feel a certain way when you don’t. It actually, if you think about your brain is going and thinking about one thing and it’s acknowledging it’s feeling an emotion of stress, but then you’re asking it to put on facial features and to say words that are in dissonance with that. And that dissonance is very, very hard for the human brain. So surface acting takes a tremendous amount of energy and that is one of the ways that it leads to burnout.
The other reason that surface acting is one of the causes of burnout is research shows that when we are surface acting, it actually prevents us from having productive, supportive relationships with others. As, again, I experienced with my team. If I’m always pretending that everything is amazing, I’m hard to relate to. People sense I’m not authentic, so they’re not sharing their emotions with me. I feel more alone. And that lack of genuine connection that that surface acting creates is also a leading cause of burnout, because, as human beings, one of our core requirements at work and outside of work is a sense of belonging, a sense that we belong; and having authentic connections with others reinforces that sense of belonging. So, if we’re surface acting, we’re not creating those connections, we feel more and more alone. And that is another reason it leads to burnout.
TS: Now, a couple times, Nataly, you’ve referenced this big burnout experience that you had. I’d like to understand a little bit more about that. And even I noticed the word “burnout,” it’s one of those things we can all kind of relate to it, but what actually is it? I’d like to understand that.
NK: Yes. So that could take us three hours of a podcast, so we won’t go there. Burnout is, as you just said—we all know when we feel it, but it’s actually difficult to define. There are some scientific definitions. Some characteristics of burnout that are widely accepted are a growing resentment toward you job, inability to complete basic things in your job, a disconnection between you and your job, not feeling like you have any energy to do your job. So those are just some common characteristics. But one of the things that is important for me to articulate and what I try to do in this book is, I went through what I call an avalanche burnout.
I actually stopped being able to function. And it was a very, very scary time. I stopped being able to function as a mom, as a leader, as an employee. And I had to put my life on hold to heal from it. But you don’t have to experience that. I think we can all relate to the idea of daily burnout, right? How many times have we gotten to the end of the day and you’re just on empty? And you’re so resentful of your work. It could be work you love, but you just can’t take it anymore. You don’t have any energy. And again, through our at-work program and my work with leaders, I hear this from people all the time.
Daily burnout, I think is a reality for so many of us, especially now. And I think that this is why emotional awareness is such an important part of awesome human qualities. I talk about it in the book. People often ask me like, “Nataly, did you see warning signs before you burnt out?” The truth is, now I can look back, of course, including every single person in my life reaching out, asking me if they could help, which at the time I just dismissed as being really annoying—because remember, I was a lone warrior superwoman. And why were people bothering to ask me if I was OK? And if they could help?
Now I can look at those warning signs—sleeping not enough, drinking too much, not eating, overidentifying with my job. But at the time, as I was kind of descending further and further into the cycle of burnout, I didn’t have the emotional awareness skills to pause and actually check in with myself and say, “Well, how am I feeling?” That was never a question I ever asked myself, Tami.
That’s one of the practices that I offer in the book around emotional awareness, is this daily check-in, which seems so simple, but it wasn’t for me. And it’s not for many of us; many of us live disconnected from our emotions. But it’s one of the best investments that you can make, helping yourself not burn out, is just checking in with yourself. Just like you check in with people you love or your teammates, and just saying, “How am I feeling? Like how is my emotional, mental and physical energy? And that awareness becomes the beginning to your ability to shift.
TS: Is it fair to say, and I want to check out with you, Nataly, that The Awesome Human Project is in some ways your response to the burnout avalanche you went through and your gift to other people of “Let me share with you what I learned so you don’t have to go through the kind of avalanche burnout I did? Practice this and it won’t happen.”
NK: I don’t think it could be put more succinctly or beautifully, Tami. I really do mean that. I say this […] on stage—I think I say this in the book—that I want to teach you these skills and practices to—I use this expression—to catch you before you fall. Because I do believe that we don’t have to burnout to be successful, to have positive impact. In fact, I always thought that was the choice that I had to make, between my wellbeing or success and achievement. And I chose success and achievement, but actually I’ve come to see it completely interconnected.
When you cultivate your emotional fitness, when you invest in a more supportive relationship with yourself, you actually have greater capacity for achievement, success and positive impact. You can do it in a more sustainable way. You can be a light in the life of others, versus, as I used to be, a pretty heavy cloud, even as I was achieving.
Your articulation is right on and I am lucky and incredibly, this is my life’s purpose, the work I do, but I work with tens of thousands of people every year in companies and in leadership settings. And I teach them, I always share my experience and I tell them what you said. I said, “These are the lessons I’ve learned.” And I’ve done a ton of research in psychology and neuroscience and behavioral science; I’m a total geek. It’s supported by research, but I do firmly believe that it is possible to do work we love, to have a positive impact in the world and not to do it as a way to burn ourselves out, and that’s why I teach these skills. So, you’re absolutely right, it’s not a book I could have written five years ago.
TS: And I want to make sure that we complete our list of these five awesome human qualities. You introduced, in the book, of course you go into these five qualities in quite a lot of depth and offer practices and skills to cultivate these qualities. We’re just touching on them here. But we briefly touched on the courage to talk back to your brain, emotional openness and becoming aware of your emotional whiteboard.
You talked about how awesome humans are leaders. And I did want to ask you one more question about that before we move on. Which is I think a lot of people are like, “Oh, come on. I don’t want to be a leader. Everybody wants to be a leader. It’s like an ego thing. I’m a leader, that means I have followers. Can’t I just be an awesome human without being a leader?”
Well, it’s a great point. But there comes, and I think I mentioned it briefly, a definition of what a leader is. A leader is not about how many people you manage or how many followers you have. It actually has nothing to do with that or what your title is or where you are in the org chart of your company or the world. None of that makes you a leader. You are a leader if you positively impact other people’s capacity to thrive. And I have yet, Tami, to meet a person—and I’m lucky to meet tens of thousands of people—who will tell me, “You know what? I do not want to have a positive impact on other people.”
You can be a leader in your family. You can be a leader in a team, on a soccer team, in your reading book club, in your church. You don’t have to be a leader just in your job. As a mom, I want to positively impact my daughter’s capacity to thrive; that makes me a leader. I think that the question you’re asking is asking us to redefine what leadership is. And one of my hopes is that I’m doing that in the book to recognize we’re all leaders if we care about having a positive impact on other people, and again, to do that, we have to practice these things first to have a positive impact on ourselves.
TS: OK, you convinced me. What are the other two awesome human qualities?
NK: The fourth one is self-compassion, which if you asked me five years ago I would not think that would be on the list. But self-compassion, as I define it is self-compassion is treating yourself the way that you would a friend with the intention to reduce struggle and suffering. And self-compassion—and part of it is self-acceptance—are two concepts, Tami, just to be honest with you, that took me the longest to even comprehend.
I used to think of self-compassion as like, “Oh Yes, I’m amazing as I am. OK. Everything is amazing about me, and I never have to improve.” And letting myself off the hook. I used to hate that idea because I misunderstood it. I thought that if I—let’s say I make a mistake or I’m not living up to my expectations, that if I just harshly plummet myself with criticism, that is how I’m going to get better.
Well, again, it took my burnout for me to shift my perspective around that, that by the way, I just want to say this, there are zero studies—not one, not two, zero—that show that harsh self-criticism helps us improve. It doesn’t. It reduces motivation and actually reduces our ability to make progress. But there’s tons of studies that show that when we fail at something or realize we’re not living up to our expectations, when we treat ourselves as we would a friend, again, we acknowledge, “Here’s a way I want to improve or here’s how I screwed up,” but then we treat ourselves in a way that reduces our suffering, we have more energy, more of our intellectual and emotional capacity to actually do the work to improve. So, self-compassion and self-acceptance, self-compassion is a really essential quality of awesome humans. The final is a commitment to practicing emotional fitness skills. And I talk about the five emotional fitness skills and give you a challenge in the book of how to practice each one of acceptance, gratitude, self-care, intentional kindness and the bigger why.
But awesome humans have a daily ongoing commitment to practicing these skills. Just like when we began this interview, you talked about physical fitness, right? You want to be physically fit, then you eat healthier, you get some movement in your day, and you do it regularly. Awesome humans are committed to regularly practicing their emotional fitness skills, so they create this more supportive relationship with themselves. So, they struggle less when things are challenging.
TS: Now, you say emotional fitness is like broccoli, what do you mean?
NK: Yes, if you’re listening and you hate broccoli, just think of another vegetable, please. Often when I talk, I say to people “emotional fitness,” and people are nodding. They’re like, “Yes, I know these are good skills.” I mention gratitude and acceptance. It’s kind of like broccoli. We all know broccoli is good for us, right? It has a lot of vitamins and nutrients, but just knowing that broccoli is good for you does not do you any good. You actually have to eat the broccoli to get the benefits, right?
I have broccoli in my fridge, but unless I eat it, I don’t get the benefits. The same with emotional fitness skills. Just knowing or reading research that, “Yes, I know gratitude’s good. I should do more self-care. I should be more kind.” Just knowing those things doesn’t give you the benefit. We actually have to practice. And I say this in my talks, and I say this in my book, if you’re getting sick of me saying the word “practice,” I’m doing something right.
TS: All right. Now I want to ask you a challenging question here, which is, I can imagine someone listening who says, “OK, I’m going to become aware of struggle and not necessarily say I have to struggle to make changes happen in the world. I don’t need to do it through struggle, but yet I look around me and I see the crises that we face as a collective, the ecological crisis climate change. And when it comes to challenges like the challenges of social justice, I need to struggle to make change in the world. I don’t want to just be some personal happy camper, comfortable with my emotions. I’m part of the struggle to change the world.” what would you say?
NK: Well, and what I would say to that is we’re mixing our terms a little. So, let’s get our terms right because there’s actually no disagreement. [This] reminds me, brings to mind, I once went several years ago to a meditation seminar, and I can’t remember who the teacher was, but he said, “OK, raise your hand if you want to make more money.” Some people raised their hand.
“Raise your hand if you want to cure cancer.” Some people raised their hand. “Raise your hand if you want to eliminate climate change.” Raised their hands. He said, “Fantastic. I don’t care why you meditate, but if you want to solve those problems, you need to meditate. And his point was who is it in the world that solves problems? Is it people who are constantly frantic, who can’t figure out how to think clearly, who are constantly at loss for clarity and direction? He said, “No. People who solve problems, they’re able to think clearly. And that’s what meditation helps you do.” They’re able to understand other people, that’s what meditation helps you do. And so that really stayed with me.
That’s at the core of what I’m saying. The reason that I am encouraging as passionately as I can, the reason I do this work for people to practice these skills to struggle less internally is when you struggle less internally, you actually have more capacity. Intellectual capacity, decision making capacity, communication capacity, problem-solving capacity to solve all these problems that you’re talking about, Tami.
In that way, I’ll go even further and say that that practicing these emotional fitness skills is not just not a luxury or something that you do to be a happy camper, because that’s not the goal. It is your responsibility to our community and our world, because the only way that you’re going to help solve these very, very real crises and problems is if you bring your full emotional, mental, intellectual, decision making capacity to them. And the only way you can do that is if you don’t waste that energy on internal struggle.
TS: You mentioned that in The Awesome Human Project, you have a five-week emotional fitness challenge, and we won’t have time to go into it. But each week we take on a different set of practices and I’m going to go into week three for a moment, because I found this interesting, where the focus is treating ourselves with self-care. And I bring that up because you have a great definition of self-care that I really appreciated, because I think sometimes people think self-care is this or that, it’s indulgent or it’s like products are being sold to me so that I scrub my skin or something, which is good. I probably should buy some products and scrub my skin a little bit more, but I’ll borrow the ones that are in the shower from my wife. But anyway, so tell us about self-care, your definition and why you think this is an important skill for awesome humans.
NK: I love that I get to talk about this, Tami, because I think there are so many misconceptions about self-care, including the ones I had of it being luxurious, self-indulgent, or something that, as you said, you need to spend money to have it. None of that is true. The way that I define self-care is a skill of fueling your emotional, mental and physical energy. And here is, very tactically, what I mean.
Take the example of a car, right? A car needs fuel to do its job of being a car. Whether it’s a gas car or an electric car. When the car runs out of gas or electricity, it cannot do its job of being a car. It doesn’t matter how hard it pushes itself, how many motivating talks it gives itself; it just can’t. Your energy is your fuel. So, if you want to be a great parent, a great friend, a colleague. If you want to work on your craft or do things that are meaningful to you, you have to have energy.
Energy is not just physical. About two-thirds of the things we do throughout the day require emotional energy. You cannot do your job of being a human without energy. And I hope, and I teach a lot of workshops on this, that just in that redefinition of self-care, we can then shift through and break through the guilt that many of us feel.
I used to feel this all the time. I cannot tell you how many people tell me, “I’d love to do something to fuel my energy, but I feel so guilty. My brain keeps telling me, ‘Other people need you.’” Well, I want you to ask yourself—what is it that other people need? Do they need you snapping at them? Do they need your heaviness? Do they need your inability to be patient or focus on them? That’s what I bring to people when I don’t practice self-care.
I think we can all say that when we say other people need me, they need you at your fullest. They need you present and patient and attentive. The only way to do that is if you have the emotional, physical, and mental energy to do it. I cannot tell you, Tami, how many—and this, everyone, grows my heart—but how many breakthroughs I’ve heard, from busy executives to stay-at home moms, who’ve told me that once they started to redefine self-care that way, it gave them the access, the opportunity to practice more of it and the differences they began to seem not in just how they felt, but in the impact they had on others. I love that we get to talk about it. I wish I could shout it from the rooftops and every media outlet, because […] it’s exactly what you said: self-care has become cheapened or luxuriated, actually, to a place of “No, you need these seven products, and you need to take two weeks off,” and needing to have this experience.
The most powerful self-care is the way we practice it every day. So, every day, one of the practices I give is can you ask yourself, I talk about a 15-minute fuel up. For 15 minutes a day, what can you do to fuel your energy? And there’s a lot of research that shows that that has a huge impact on your wellbeing, as well as on your ability to be at your best and whatever is meaningful to you.
TS: Yes. It’s interesting just using that metaphor of being a vehicle and I’m at the refueling station friends where if I use that language, I think everyone around me would be like, “Please refuel yourself. Excellent.”
NK: It’s been amazing to see. I teach this practice of the daily fuel to companies, to executives, to teams and their whole teams that practice it together. So what they do is they end their team meeting 15 minutes early at every week. And then the 15 minutes that’s left is everyone’s fuel-up time. I’ve heard from so many people who said, “I never used that word at work, ‘self-care.’ It just kind of didn’t fit.
But we’re all talking about “Did you fuel up today? What you do for your fuel-up today? Oh, you took a walk. I’m going to do that for my fuel-up.” So, I think a lot of what I’ve tried to do—and again, I only share what I’ve done for myself and with others—is, words matter and language matters. And if we define self-care the right way, it actually gives us access to practice it more.
TS: The last point I want to bring up, Nataly, is in the fifth week of your five-week emotional challenge. You help people connect to their bigger why. How is that part of emotional fitness? And will you share with us your bigger why?
NK: It is really difficult. I was going to say impossible—between difficult and impossible—to be an awesome human and to have wellbeing and to feel like you’re living fully. If you don’t feel like your life has a purpose—and one of the big shifts in my mind that I articulated in the book around purpose, is I think often we think of sense of meaning or purpose is something that’s out there and we have to go find it, right? The Alchemist is an amazing book that many of us have read, where the young boy goes on a pilgrimage to find a sense of purpose. I want to invite everyone listening and reading the book to reconsider that your sense of purpose is not somewhere out there, but it’s actually in your life as it is right now. And the practice is to connect with it.
The way that we do that is by connecting things that we are doing, the projects at work, the stuff we’re working on at home to how does it help other people? How does it contribute to something other bigger than you? That is where most of us find meaning. And you asked me what my sense of purpose is and what my bigger why is, and my bigger why is to help as many people as possible learn these science-backed skills so they can struggle less even when life is challenging.
And it’s very personal for me because we started by talking about my coming here as a refugee from a tradition where struggle was actually something that was venerated and worshipped. Like if you were struggling, you were doing something right. So, it’s a very personal sense of purpose for me because I feel that I’ve gone through a lot to transcend where I come from and to bring the best of what I’ve learned to help others struggle less.
And I am incredibly optimistic—I’m not an optimist by nature, and I’m not sure there are many Russian Jewish optimists in the world. I’m not an optimist by nature, but I have a very optimistic view of us all having this capacity to learn these skills, to struggle less and then to bring our unique abilities to solve all the problems, to help each other, to create a world that we’re excited for ourselves and our kids to live in.
I’m a human, so there are days when I wake up and there’s a pile of work and I’m like, “Oh my God, I don’t want to do this.” And that’s actually something I say in the book, that’s important to say. Just because you find your work meaningful, it doesn’t mean you are always excited about it. And it doesn’t mean there are days when you’re not sick of it. That just makes you human. But most of the time I pinch myself, Tami, that I get to wake up every day and do whatever I can to serve what feels like after 46 years is the clearest and most honest sense of purpose and bigger why that I have.
TS: I’ve been talking with awesome human Nataly Kogan. She’s the author of the new book, The Awesome Human Project: Break Free from Daily Burnout, Struggle Less, and Thrive More in Work and Life. The book is filled with very practical suggestions you can start working on immediately to develop more emotional fitness in your life. Nataly, great to talk to you and thanks for being such an awesome human and inspiring other humans to be awesome humans. Thank you.
NK: Thank you, Tami. Thank you. Your thoughtful questions helped me be at my best, so I’m so grateful for that.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at resources2.soundstrue.com/podcast. That’s resources2.soundstrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. And if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
