Interview with Dr. Edy Greenblatt, Resilience Expert and CEO of the Restoration Vacation

Edy Greenblatt, CEO of Restoration Vacation, was one of the earliest researchers in the area of resilience. She shares how individuals can learn to become more resilient, and how organizations can ensure that all employees have the skills they need to manage their own resilience to stay above the “burnout line” and work effectively.

Episode Details

Show Notes

Edy Greenblatt, CEO of Restoration Vacation, was one of the earliest researchers in the area of resilience. She has a PhD in organizational Behavior from Harvard University, and a masters degree in dance ethnology from UCLA.

Edy’s definition of resilience is the ability to recover from trauma back to normalcy quickly. This means having the physical, emotional and cognitive resources needed, and the psychological, social, and spiritual energy to access to those resources, so that you can do what you want and need to do each day.  To be resilient is to be able to control those resources in order to stay above the burnout line, which is the point below which the normal strategies, the very personal strategies that work for you to be okay, stop working.

If your parents were traumatized, she says,  you have changed mitochondrial DNA—you  have inherited fear and trauma.

The key is knowing the behaviors and conditions that restore you, and those that deplete you. Then managing those restorers and depleters every hour, every day, every week, just like you manage the food you eat, your sleep, and the water you drink.
Organizations, she says, need to train employees how to manage what restores and depletes them. Organization leaders need to put in place the policies, practices, norms, and culture, to create an environment where each aspect of the organization supports resilience. Edy’s company is creating an AI enabled app that actually helps people do these assessments and provides individualized recommendations on how to be more resilient.

WHAT IS FEARLESS GROWTH WITH AMANDA SETILI?

We all want to do work we love, and as leaders, entrepreneurs and employees, wouldn’t it be great to create workplaces where work feels like play?

Where people are tuned in to changes going on in the world around them? Where they’re constantly learning, spotting new opportunities, and taking action to go after them? These traits are essential to an organization’s agility and success.

In the Fearless Growth podcast, Amanda Setili and her guests explore the mindsets and choices that lead individuals, leaders and their organizations to outstanding performance.

Transcript

Amanda Setili (00:06):
We all want to do work that we love. And as leaders, entrepreneurs, and employees, wouldn’t it be great to create workplaces where work feels like play, where people are tuned in to the changes going on in the world, around them, where they’re constantly learning, starting new opportunities and taking action to go after them. I’m Amanda [inaudible]. And this is the fearless growth podcast where my guests and I will explore the mindsets and choices that lead you and your organization to outstanding performance.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (00:38):
Today I have, as my guests, Dr. Ed Greenblatt, she is CEO of restoration vacation. She’s an executive coach. She has a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard business school and Harvard university, a joint degree. She has a master’s in dance ethnology from UCLA and an undergrad from UCLA. And I’m so excited to talk with you today, ed, because you explore the area of resilience, which I think is so important, especially in these times that we’re living through right now. So welcome ed. Thank you very much, Amanda. It’s pleasure to be here. What first led to your interest in resilience? Was this something that you always had been curious about or did you flounder around for a long time at Harvard, trying to figure out what your, what your focus was going to be and finally landed on resilience? No, actually my first career was as a dance anthropologist.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (01:33):
I was a dance teacher, a dancer and dance teacher of recreational and social dance forms. From the time I started dancing when I was eight or nine and I was being trained as a teacher from the time I was 10. So I was involved in world dance and ended up dancing with ensembles and doing field work. When I was 18, 19 20, I actually left UCLA for awhile. I was pre biology pre-med and went and did what’s now called field work. But then it was simply I got to go dance and learn and did research, ethnographic research and dance with ensembles in Macedonia and Serbia then came back and found the world arts and cultures program. And so I ended up studying music, dance theater, folklore, mythology, art and anthropology. While I did the pre-med curriculum. By the time I finished the degree in applied to med school, the program in dance ethnology offered me a scholarship and funding and TA ships and made me an offer.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (02:32):
I couldn’t refuse. I figured I, so I turned down Hopkins medical school and went into dance. So no, it wasn’t it wasn’t intentional. It was after being in the world and seeing the damage done by work. When I was working with dance students that I decided to get on the other side of, of the cause of the damage. So instead of healing the damage done by work as a dance person, I decided to make work less damaging and went to get the PhD. Fascinating. What, what are the main factors related to resilience? What, in a nutshell, what, what gives people resilience and what does the word even mean to you? Okay, great. So the definition piece is important. The term resilience has a lot of uses. One that you hear a lot is the psychological term resilience, which is tied to recovering from trauma.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (03:25):
Someone who is resilient as someone who recovers from trauma back to normalcy quickly in the working world and in my world. The term that I use, which is, you know, recovering from professional exhaustion, being resilient deals with being able to have the energy, have the energy, you need to do everything. That’s important to you having the physical, the emotional, the cognitive resources, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual energy access to those energies, to be able to do what you want. So to be resilient is to be able to control and increase those resources and to stay above the burnout line, which is the point below which the normal strategies, the normal, very personal strategies that work for you to be okay, stop working. And the things that normally deplete you are amplified. So to me, to be resilient as to know how to stay above the burnout line in every dimension and sort of actively manage your, when your energies, as I have been exploring this idea of fearless growth, which is where my second book was about, I’ve often wondered, is it just something about me that makes me fearless, that gives me so much energy, or is it the way that I’ve designed my life?

Amanda Setili (04:44):
Do you think that some people just inherently know how to restore themselves and how to maintain high energy levels? There is something about their constitution or is that something that we’ve figured out how to do?

Edy Greenblatt That’s a really good question., it feels like there are two questions in there, right? It’s the nature nurture question. And the first one is around the nature nurture question of fear. And the other one seems to be around the resilience. I’m not an expert on fear. You know, I, I took a lot of social psychology seminars as part of the required work for the degrees. What I know is with many aspects of being human tends to be half and half, right? Some people have, people are born with tendencies, predispositions, physiological, cognitive, right down to their mitochondrial DNA. If the parents were traumatized, your mom was traumatized, you have changed mitochondrial DNA.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (05:43):
So you have inherited fear and trauma. So there’s, there’s the nature and there’s this sort of nature and nurture field. And so I’m not an expert on fear or what we know is that, you know, experiences in life can create damage as well. That’s the nurture piece on resilience. I know a little bit more the research on psychological resilience basically argues sort of the nature nurture piece a little bit that said there is a huge amount that we can do to become more resilient from wherever our baseline is. Right? So if you have a baseline, biological, cognitive, social, emotional baseline that the things that I learned in the personal resource management research, I did the, the keys to being able to manage your rent, your resilience, your energy, your wellness are that you need to become an expert at knowing the behaviors and conditions that restore and deplete you and those manage those every hour, every day, every week, just like you manage, you know, the food you eat, just like you manage your sleep, just like you manage the water you drink, be aware of when you need things, make plans to have it understand when there’s going to be particular strain on that resource.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (07:05):
So know what restores and depletes you become a manager or an expert at that and manage it. I was running a company. If I was a CEO, would it be more valuable to train all of my employees? And all of these things would be expensive, right? To train all of my employees, how to understand their own resilience profile and manage their own resilience, or would it be more effective for me to build certain resilience aspects into the business systems and processes that I use, like having enforced, you have to take vacation, or, you know, we have three hours a day with no video or better ways of managing accountability or a better recognition, which would be better. My friend Wendy Smith created did her research on both and right, the answer is both hands one. The concept that I work with with organizations is called integrated resilience.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (08:00):
Integrated resilience works in different domains. So for starters, in, in the business setting, you need to have, you need to integrate all the components of the organization and the organizational policies, practices, norms, culture, to create an environment where each aspect of the organization supports resilience. Then at the team level, you need to have norms, behaviors, policies that will support that communication and training. And at the individual level, you want to give people the kind of control communication skills and specific training to know exactly about resilience and how to do it. So it’s actually not expensive to train people to understand this right half day workshop will basically get people enough skills to be able to take this into their own hands, use it. If they’re ready for it with some supportive coaching and you can, you know, we, we train coaches on how to do this.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (09:02):
This is, this is not brain surgery. This is about understanding certain components about human beings and how to, and learning about yourself. This is, does not require 20 years of therapy. Now it’s helpful to have, you know, a coach to have sometimes when, so solutions for organizations will offer. We’ll have it start with an initial training for organization members. There’s an, are there organizations that actually have this on their online training? They log in for half an hour. They go through a custom program that we made with the organization to answer a few questions and they have enough skills. You can buy a used copy of my book, which has all this stuff in it for $4. I mean, now it’s not, it’s not expensive and it’s not complicated. That’s the sort of the beauty of it. People’s family factor into this, because I would imagine that certain things that restore people become impossible when they get home from work and they’ve got to fix dinner and they’ve got people asking them for things.
Edy Greenblatt 2 (10:02):

And then when they want to go on vacation, their spouse and their kids have a completely different idea of what would be fun. And so how does that factor in, when I talk about integrated resilience, we talk about multiple levels of the organization. And we also talk about domains of resilience. So we need to manage our resilience at home in work settings or in professional settings on the road, either traveling for work and on vacation. So the strategies and the skills that we use, we use cross domain. So it’s not just managing boundaries between work. And non-work a lot of what you’re referring to is managing interpersonal and intrapersonal boundaries, if, if what you need as an endeavor. So first of all, knowing what you need. So if understanding that there are depleting conditions at home, which are for example, interruption or emotional contagion, right?

Edy Greenblatt 2 (10:59):
Upset the children, or right, there are particular sources of depletion, which occur at home. Then it’s up to the person in that the person who is at the center of that problem, which is, you know, I have to take care of me to try to create behaviors and conditions at work for them. This involves communication with stakeholders. This involves creating norms. For example, there are, I have clients who basically stop on their way home from work and stop and actually stop at a coffee shop and sit there for five minutes and have a cup of coffee in order to sort of regroup and create a boundary between work and home and prepare themselves for return home. There are norms with your kids in terms of vacation. You get into the question of different resilience profiles. This is also about planning and communication actually about assessment.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (11:55):
And to that end, you know, my work includes assessment on resilience profile. Like what, what are the, what do you need? What is your type, your resilience type? What do you need in general? And what do you need given the conditions, again, nature nurture, right? Or current, right? It’s sort of trait versus state. We have our trade preferences like you and I have, have have restoration profiles, which are very physical. They’re very vestibular. They have to do with water, right? Those that’s one of our physical resilience profiles, right. But there’s also statewide trait, state like conditions, you know, given in a pandemic, you have a different set of needs and constraints than you have not independent. So it’s really about getting, you know, the, the assessment piece, assessing yourself and then making a plan and implementing it with the support of stakeholders or helpers.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (12:48):
Well, and I think you also have to help your stakeholders manage their own resilience. So you have to make sure that if you’ve got a kid that needs quiet time every day, that they get it, that you, if you have a spouse that needs to go play golf, that they get it, everybody’s got a cut. I would think kind of keep an eye on each other’s resilience factors. Do, do you agree with that? Yeah. You’ve got your a hundred percent, right. You know, one of the things that, that, that you’re referring to is one of what I call one of the three Musketeers of resilience. So there are three really important things sort of ideas that if you keep in mind, it’s easier to define what you need. And the first one is that people are different in what restores and depletes them.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (13:32):
Right? So if you think about, take some warm, warm, dry towels out of the, out of the dryer, right, you’ve washed the towels and you’ve dried them and now you need to fold. Right? When I do this, when I, when I survey groups and I’ve surveyed hundreds of thousands of people on this about one third of the population is basically going to say, folding, those towels is reliably restorative. And about a half to two thirds is about a half, is going to say completely depleting waste. Right. Right. Okay. so we’re different. And so it becomes really important to have to understand that we are all different. Then there are two other Musketeers of resilience. We can talk about it if you want, but that’s really hugely important. And the common way people talk about resilience, they, they assume that there’s only one, you know, the things are that are the same for everybody.

Amanda Setili (14:24):
I thought everybody hated doing dishes. People think meditation is good for everybody. If everybody could meditate successfully and comfortably, yes, it would be restorative for everybody, but everybody can’t. And doesn’t, I’m so glad you said that because I’m not a good meditator, but I am good at other things, which I think served the same purpose. Proprioceptive writing works for me, swimming or for me kiteboarding works for me. Walking works really well for me. And so maybe I never will learn to really be a good meditator. So you can maybe fold the other two Musketeers into my next question, which you said something really interesting about club med. My husband and I and family have been to club med many times all over the world. And I just love it. I think it’s just the most fabulous concept ever. And I love being able to do a lot of different sports and in a day I love the social aspect of it.

Amanda Setili (15:21):
I love the fact that I don’t have to think when I’m about what I’m going to do. I just book, you know, pay one fee and I go, and I know I’m going to have fun, but one of the things that’s so special about it is these GOs who are the, you know, they help with the sports, they help with the dance. And they also sit with you at mealtime and carry on a good conversation. So they’re really a multitalented group of folks. But you did some work studying these folks in terms of how, how has their lifestyle, how, how much has their turnover and things like that. So could you tell us a little bit about that research and maybe fold the other couple of Musketeers into that answer? So well, the Musketeers came from club Reggio. So CIOs is a geo means basically they’re the summer camp counselors for the grownups, right?

Edy Greenblatt 2 (16:11):
If you were for the guests, right? They do the same thing that, that overnight summer camp counselors too, which is, they basically live with you and make sure that your, your needs are met through their skills, their interpersonal skills, their social skills, their professional skills. So I, when I was looking for a place to study resilience, I basically selected club med because I was so impressed with, with the geos capacity to live these 24 7 work styles before people actually coined the term 24, 7 [inaudible] were working six days on half a day off. And the club med concept was to me, just genius. And I actually used to teach dancing at dance camps where I lived like a geo and I couldn’t sustain it for more than a week at a time. And these people were doing it for six months at a time.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (17:02):
But the research was to see, first of all, club med geos turn over at 90% a year when they live and work in paradise. So the perfect place, basically a closed laboratory to study, what really are the behaviors and conditions that allow people to reliably restore? Or how do you burn out in what people think is paradise? Everything, you know, the beginning of all of this research started with in terms of, in terms of the other two Musketeers, these came from learning with the geos, right? One of the things that we learned was that, you know, you have to be really clear on understanding that what you call something does not imply whether it’s restorative or depleting. So you want to don’t you want to not get caught in social tags, right? Work is not depleting. A commute by definition is either restorative or depleting vacations can be depleting, right?

Edy Greenblatt 2 (17:53):
So what we learned from club med geos is there are activities that we do, which are reliably restorative. And there are activities that we do that deplete particular resources. So when you look at a club med geos day, you see that there are activities that are embedded in the way they operate. That reliably restore a lot of people. That’s the genius of club med, for example, crazy signs, right? Then the dancing around the pool. This is reliably restorative. This is genius. This is Neuropsychopharmacology plus movement analysis. This is fricking genius. Okay? Because what you do is you have an opportunity to restore physically. You have an opportunity to engage socially or not. You have an opportunity to do provide the similar stimulation. You have opportunity to be part of unison movement. You have something that changes your blood sugar levels. And so number one is you want to avoid the social tags and be really clear that it’s a particular behavior or characteristic of the behavior and the impact that it has on you.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (18:58):
The other thing we learned from club med G as well, this isn’t a musketeer, but this is really important. Our overdose effects, right? What burned out was overdosing on the things they actually came to club med for. So it’s what you’re passionate about is flying on the trapeze. You get to fly on the trapeze and teach trapeze all day. What, what, what the geos did on their half day off made a big difference in them burning out. So if a geo who worked on scuba actually went scuba diving on their half-day off. They were more likely to burn out than somebody who liked scuba, who flew on the trapeze on their half day off, because you could overdose on things you love and think about it. You overdose on your children. You can overdose on two extroverts overdose on people. So you want to be really careful about that.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (19:49):
And then the last Musketeers are sources of depletion and restoration change over time based on who we are, where we are in our lives, and when the conditions around us. So, you know, geos who are mostly novelty, seeking adventure are highly social extroverts. Their favorite thing to restore was having a pizza alone in my room, on my night off, because they were overdosing on, you know, people and groups and needed, you know, serious dyadic or alone time. This brings me back to my mother’s often given advice, which is quit while you’re still having fun. Absolutely. You know, leave the party while you’re still on the high. Don’t wait until it’s winding down. She’s a hundred percent, right.

Amanda Setili (20:54):
Edy, you’ve done amazing research and you’re very deeply expert on the resilience theme. What do you wish you could explore more or just a different thing that you would like to explore if time were no issue? what do you find particularly fascinating? That’s on your list of things to research or not necessarily formally researched, but just learn more about in the rest of your life.

Well, we’re building, we’re building an AI enabled app that actually helps people do these assessments and recommendations on how to be more resilient. We’re building that. Now, if people are interested in hearing more about it, they should just reach out to me. It’s to help HR department, help organizations and individuals really get the benefit of of you being able to do this for homework, their families on vacation, whatever. So where I’m, I’m spending a lot of time learning more about artificial intelligence, about running a startup. I’m spending a lot of time learning. I’m actually in a course on digital media marketing, because I think everybody needs to understand how we are being affected by these communications and how to help people benefit from them.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (21:52):
And so I’m actually enrolled in a five month course on that in Hebrew, which is forcing me to increase my Hebrew cause I’m based in Israel these days. I’m also I’m, I’m going to become a tour guide. There’s a, this remarkable program in Israel to become a certified licensed tour guide. It’s basically like getting a master’s degree in everything. Israel is the most interdict it’s more interdisciplinary than my bachelor’s degree, which was music, dance, theater, folklore, mythology, art anthropology, globally. Okay. this is everything about Israel and it’s a one and a half year program where you travel throughout the country and physically visit the sites and study linguistics and history and really comparative religion and philosophy and climate. And so that’s, that’s what I’m on track to start studying in July. But you know, those are, I, you know, I fly on the trapeze and stuff, but that’s something I’m learning about all the time.

Amanda Setili (22:51):
So you’re clearly a lifelong learner. I also am a lifelong learner and I just find learning to be fascinating and restorative and great. Are there people who, for whom learning is actually not a thing that helps them or is, is a goal for them? Like how do people separate along those lines of, you know, I’m not an expert at it, but I’ll take a stab. We’re all different and there’s different kinds of learning, right? The kind of learning that there are people who love sort of embodied learning, right? That’s the you and me, right? The kite surfing another sport, another physical activity and other physical fit. And there are people who just restore by learning more there’s people who restore by sort of absorbing cognitive facts. I have family friends who are data geeks and their brains are uniquely suited to that. And they just love absorbing facts.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (23:51):
There are people who love exploring, exploring, right? The kind of learning, which is exploratory, not necessarily structured. The lovely Brazilian man who walked past me in the park today, loves people’s stories. And, and, and I think there are people who are simply good with what they have. I remember meeting someone as an adult who I knew as a child who’s who really wasn’t compelled to improve herself the way we crazy people are. She was happy to spend time with her kids and her family and, you know, work at the factory and come home and just be a normal person engaging in normal life. And I was a little bit jealous that, yeah, you know, I was on my way to Harvard to get a freaking PhD, to do a 180 and changed from being a dance, the biologist to doing organizational behavior, work, changing cities, changing countries, bringing my disabled mom to live with me after 17 years living apart like right.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (24:57):
She was like, they were just happy. So again, we’re all different. And I think it’s just important to not pass judgment and to, you know, understand what works for us and just be there. Yeah. I think that a big opportunity for the world is to help young people figure out not only what’s restorative for them, but what, what would make them feel really fulfilled in life? Like, I don’t think we’re good at helping people with that. I mean, we try to give them different experiences so they can test different things, but I really don’t think that we’re very good at helping people find their calling, where they’re going to really be engaged in what they’re doing every day at work. And that’s an area that I really want to explore more is how can we run a workplace where people tend to be able to find those ways to contribute that feel really great for them and feel like they’re learning and challenged, but also that they’re appreciated and contributing and, and kind of in the zone, what’s your hunch.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (26:02):
I think allowing flexibility to try different things using assessments, these are all off the top of my head, but things that I’ve helped people with ever over the years and letting people have more say so in what their accountabilities are, what they’re willing to do, what they’d love to do so that people can see so that the work kind of naturally flows to the areas of need that. You know what I think I agree very much with what you’re saying. It makes sense. It’s consistent with the research on team effectiveness. So I my advisor was Richard Hackman and spent his life looking at first job design. And then the biggest part of his research on team effectiveness. And what you’re talking about is consistent with the research on team effectiveness in helping people, helping organizations and people to have a fit and understand, particularly designing tasks that fit helping communicate the needs and preferences and strengths doing assessments, and then communicating that information in a way which respects that, but simultaneously respects the needs of the organization and the needs of the employee.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (27:19):
We’ve actually every, every team I’ve because I studied with him. I did a lot of team effectiveness, work and development with with, you know, hundreds of professional teams, NBA teams, working business people, teams. And one of the things we make sure people do at their team launch is get out the needs and the expectations, because we know the three criteria for team effectiveness. One is that the client is satisfied or at least satisfied with the outcome, right? That’s the key stakeholder. The second is that the team increases its capacity to work together again in the future. But the third is that the individual got something of value up to themselves. Now it’s not, it’s, it’s not proportional, right? So when I’m working in a team it’s very often, especially in a work setting, it’s more important that the stakeholders get what they need, then that I’m happy.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (28:11):
Cause I wanted to, you know, make the slides purple, but you can’t have real team effectiveness unless you have all three of those criteria met to some extent. So I think you’re right on it. I think it’s about designing the organization, the tasks and communicating people’s needs. We do that. We do that in restorations vacation, that every time I have a work team, I even have a volunteer student MBA student teams doing work for me. And we spend a lot of time on developing that and finding out what they need and making it part of the evaluation.

Amanda Setili (28:43):
This leads me to another question. Some people would say that the Gallup information shows that only 30% of people at work are engaged and people lament the fact that there’s so many people at work who are not satisfied, who are disengaged. Do you, do you buy into that? Or what, how do you see workers in general? And I’m thinking, especially at the U S but you can, you can set this in any context. Do you see that there’s a huge problem with a lack of engagement or with burnout, or do you think this is only a, a medium size problem? It’s a huge problem. Okay. Presenteeism. So Gallup’s work is not the first work. Gallup does wonderful research, very comprehensive. They have access to great data, but we’ve seen this research now for more than 10 years. So this engagement has direct implications for both the organization, the team for the organization and the team on the individual lack of job satisfaction.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (29:49):
There’s research on there’s extraordinarily great research on job satisfaction and its impact from, you know, even 30 years ago. So disengaged dissatisfied workforce is an issue. The question of, you know, the implications of that have to do with how you’re measuring it. So, you know, if I just say someone, are you satisfied with your job? You know, that’s not a good measure, right? You need a real, you need robust measures to measure job satisfaction and engagement and, and the outcomes for it. But is it a huge problem? Yes. Is it increasing or has it been increasing? It’s at least increasing in it’s being reported. Okay. So 30 years ago, people didn’t ask.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (30:37):
Right. It’s the same as it’s the same as, you know, women who are being molested. Right. If nobody, if nobody reports it, it doesn’t exist. So the question, you know do I believe that only 30 people are engaged? Yeah. Yeah. The question is how much engagement do you want and what do you want and how are you defining it? I would actually go back the other way, but this has been a, this has been a problem for years, right? This is even when I was doing my initial research, I started my research in 96 and we were dealing with job satisfaction was one of the, you know, one of the reasons we looked at this. So it is a huge, huge problem. It is. It’s growing in that. So look, it matters more in white collar work because you know, when you have jobs, w w when your workforce is, is easily replaced, you don’t really give a and you don’t have to, okay, I’m sorry.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (31:31):
You make cameras. And is that open as an organization? You can’t afford it, right. If you can get a different hamburger flipper, who doesn’t like being hamburger flipper, you didn’t take the job for that. He took the job for the $4 an hour he could get, so he could, you know, pay the bills. Okay. So, you know, you need to, when you’re talking about, as a difficult job market organizations have to deal with this because there’s scarcity among certain particular, you know, knowledge workers. So is it huge? It’s absolutely huge. And it’s costing billions. So that’s why, that’s why finally resilience is coming forward, because now between the lockdown and the better ways to measure things, and basically changes in the role of HR and leadership, and frankly, the population of people who are leading organizations, we’ve got, so it’s the right direction to measure this and understand that it’s there.

Amanda Setili (32:23):
But yeah, it’s enormous. It’s enormous interesting that your focus is mainly on resilience, which to me almost sounds like a remedy to stress in the workplace or whatever, but we need a certain amount of stress, I think, to be effective. You need to have that kind of urge or the difficult goal, or kind of the reason to get your adrenaline going. I think, cause I think another form of burnout is apathy or drifting. So people who are at work and maybe not much is being asked of them and they’re like, why am I even here? Or does anyone even know what I’m doing? Or I’m not sure if my boss appreciates what I’m doing. And I find that to be at least as big of a problem as people being overtaxed by their work. What do you think about that? So really you asked really good questions.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (33:16):
You, you, you you hit on a couple of things. So number one, stress, there’s two kinds of the body reads one, chemical has one chemical response to stress, right? But there are two kinds of stress. There’s use stress and distress, right? You stress the stress from positive things in distress is stress from negative things. The body’s biochemical reaction is the same, but you know, if you’re stressed because you’re going to get married, right? You’re you still have the same cortisol and other kinds of neurotransmitter responses. So there is, there is cognitive. So if you look at my model, which is, you know, everybody has different needs. So when you talk about apathy and drifting, there’s a piece of meaningfulness that’s missing right? There is that, that that’s about a psychological and social sense of is this important? Is this meaningful? So meaningfulness is a separate issue.

Edy Greenblatt 2 (34:15):
The lack of meaningful work is a depleter of multiple resources. Having too much stress is a depleter having insufficient stress, right? Like I wouldn’t call it stress, I’d call it motivation or, or energy or cognitive load. Right. So, you know, being bored is a, depleter just like having too much cognitive load, right. For being a being asked to solve a problem and having the capacity to solve a problem, but not enough time to do it, or having too much time to get into the nitty gritty and letting your own personal narratives start to interfere with the capacity to solve it. Right. So I think when you define the resilience piece by does this have a depleting, a restorative effect in which domain, then you can then resilience has a broader implication. So stress in the workplace, there is it’s that U shaped curve, right?

Edy Greenblatt 2 (35:19):
Not enough incentive, not enough enthusiasm, not enough reason to push through minor challenges, right? Not enough growth opportunities, not enough, you know, incentive to be out on the, you know, the growing tip of learning and challenging isn’t. But I don’t think we need to create, we don’t need to intentionally create stress in a setting we need to create. For example, you referred to sort of goals, stretch goals. Well, I know from the research on stress goals is a stretch goal that is somewhere between 60% and 75% likely to be achieved is incentivizing. If it’s too hard to achieve, it’s discouraging. And if it’s not, you know, stretching off it doesn’t motivate. So it’s really absolutely to what extent and under what conditions, right. It’s really a little bit, and that’s why it’s so important for people to set their own goals. I think where, I mean, obviously you need some guidelines or goals or guardrails around that, but when people set goals that they believe are 60 to 75% achievable, they’re going to be more motivated to work hard.

Amanda Setili (36:32):
Edy, this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion and I hope that we can do it again sometime because I think we’ve just scratched the surface of, of, of these issues. And maybe you and I can each go off and do some independent thinking and come back with some, some new ground to cover next time that we talk, thank you so much for being here today. I’m so, so grateful for the opportunity. And I’m really thankful for the work you’re doing on fearless growth, you know, fears, fear, socks right. Our amygdala is, and our prefrontal cortex is need be well cared for. So the work you’re doing is really important. Short-Term, long-term at the organizational team and individual level and at the societal level, if we can reduce fear, we can make the world a much better place. So thank you very much for all you’re doing and thank you for the opportunity. Very good. And I hope I can be a beta tester for your AI

Amanda Setili (37:26):
When you get it going. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Edy. Bye bye. Hi, thank you for listening to fearless growth. You can find out more about the show. It’s tilly.com/podcast, and you can listen on apple podcasts and Spotify. If you like what you’ve heard, please take a moment to write a review and give us a star rating reviews matter so much in helping others find us. Thanks for your support.

Edy Greenblatt 3 (38:02):
[Inaudible].

Are You Ready to Grow Fearlessly? Sign up for our newsletter and receive a free booklet to get started.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Start typing and press Enter to search