Brad Stulberg researches, writes and coaches on health, well-being, and sustainable excellence. He is the bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and coauthor of Peak Performance. Stulberg regularly contributes to the New York Times, and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, among many other publications. He is on faculty at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health. In his coaching practice, he works with executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, and athletes. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics and new technologies, to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions and becoming a parent, we undergo change in transformation, both good and bad, regularly. Change is not the exception, it's the rule. On today's program, we welcome Brad Stulberg, bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and his new book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing - Including You. While we endlessly fight change, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self, we can flip the script on its head. Brad's book offers a path for embracing and even growing from life's constant instability.
Drawing on cutting edge science, ancient wisdom, and daily practice, Stulberg offers concrete principles for developing a mindset called rugged flexibility, as well as habits and practices to implement it. Along the way, listeners will learn how to be in conversation with change instead of it happening to you. The importance of expectations, why cultivating a rugged yet flexible sense of self is key to a strong identity, and how to take productive action during uncertainty. I'm so excited to welcome Brad to the show today inside another episode of the Burleson Box.
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Dustin Burleson:
From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics and new technologies, to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions and becoming a parent, we undergo change in transformation, both good and bad, regularly. Change is not the exception, it's the rule. Hey, it's Dustin, and you're listening to another episode of the Burleson Box. On today's program, we welcome Brad Stulberg, bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness in his new book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing - Including You. While we endlessly fight change, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self, we can flip the script on its head. Brad's book offers a path for embracing and even growing from life's constant instability.
Drawing on cutting edge science, ancient wisdom, and daily practice, Stulberg offers concrete principles for developing a mindset called rugged flexibility, as well as habits and practices to implement it. Along the way, listeners will learn how to be in conversation with change instead of it happening to you. The importance of expectations, why cultivating a rugged yet flexible sense of self is key to a strong identity, and how to take productive action during uncertainty. I'm so excited to welcome Brad to the show today inside another episode of the Burleson Box.
I'm so excited to welcome Brad Stulberg onto the program. Brad, thanks for being here.
Brad Stulberg:
Hey Dustin, it's good to be here. Thanks.
Dustin Burleson:
I read your guest editorial in the New York Times and it slapped me in the forehead and I thought, holy cow, it was such a great, great topic. And then I went to the bottom and saw, oh, Brad has a new book out. I'm familiar with your book, The Practice of Groundedness. Tell us about the Master of Change. Why did you write this book? And I want to give listeners some background on when you wrote the book because I think that's really fascinating.
Brad Stulberg:
I wrote the book because, well, first I'll start with the personal side of things. In the last five and a half, six years of my life, it sure feels like I've lived through just a whole deluge of pretty significant life changes. I became a father for the first time, quit my job in the corporate world to go full-time as an author, became a father for the second time, moved across the country, had major orthopedic surgery on my leg that forced me out of a sport that had been an outsized part of my identity, and on and on and on.
So just a lot of capital D disorder events in my own life. And then I distinctly remember in 2021, we'd been living with the Coronavirus for around 15 months at the time, so it was maybe mid-spring of 2021, I was in my kitchen browsing my wife's iPad at news headlines and every single headline was written in the spirit of when are we going to get back to normal? And something about those headlines just struck me the wrong way. And I didn't know what at the time, but I had this visceral reaction to those headlines. And I distinctly remember going into Google and doing a query in the spirit of why do we think about getting back to normal after changes? And that was the first thing that I typed into my computer that eventually led to this rabbit hole of researching and reporting on change, and ultimately the new book.
Dustin Burleson:
You go deep in the book on this thing, I think, that happens to almost all of us in these times of change where we become disoriented. And I loved some really cool research you cited that talks about what happens to our brains and how we react. What did you find when you went deep on this book? The references are awesome. What did you find? And by the way, so you were really researching this book during the pandemic still, right? We're still in the midst of it.
Brad Stulberg:
That's right. I was researching and writing it in the pandemic. The first main thesis of the book that is born in the research is the difference between homeostasis and allostasis. So homeostasis was first coined in 1865 by a physiologist named Walter Cannon. And even before he gave this concept a name, it had long existed in the earliest sciences that we have on record. And homeostasis essentially says that living beings crave stability, that any kind of change is bad because it's a threat to stability, and that when a change or chaos or disorder occurs, we try to get back to stability as fast as possible. So homeostasis describes the change cycle as order, disorder, back to order, hence those headlines, when are we going to get back to normal? However, in the last 15, 20 years, particularly in neuroscience, but it's really spread across the biology research community and life sciences, folks have decided that homeostasis isn't really an accurate model for change.
And they have coined this term allostasis. The two scientists that are predominantly behind this are named Peter Sterling and the late Joseph Eyer, and they define the change cycle is order, disorder, reorder. So they acknowledge that it's true that living systems, human beings, even organizations crave stability, but that stability is always recreating itself. It's always somewhere new. And rather than resist change, they argue that we should be participants in change. And that while it's true that change shapes us, we also have an opportunity to shape change. And I think that the etymology of these two words really tells the story. So homeostasis comes from the Latin root homo, which means same and stasis, which means standing. So it argues that we stay stable by staying the same. Now, allostasis comes from the Latin root allo, which means change or variable and stasis, which again means standing. So that translates to stability through change, and it has this beautiful double meaning that it's possible to be stable through change. And the way to be stable through change is through changing, at least to some extent.
Dustin Burleson:
You've coined this brilliant phrase, rugged flexibility. I just love that. What have you seen? I know you work with high level executives and physicians and athletes. What have you seen? Because I've seen a lot of burnout in dentistry and orthodontics and in this idea you brilliantly identify, let's get back to normal, we're never going back to pre-pandemic. There is no normal to go back to. What have you seen, I guess, in the last three to five years, and where do you see us moving forward with this idea in mind of rugged flexibility? And maybe let's just start with how did you come up with that and how do you see it working in the lives of the people you help?
Brad Stulberg:
All right, so I stumble on this dichotomy of homeostasis versus allostasis. And very quickly I come to my own conclusion based on a whole lot of reporting in the scientific community that allostasis is a better fit model for change, whether it's change in biology, psychology, and even social systems. So then of course the next question is, well, order, disorder, reorder, I get that intellectually, but how do we actually navigate this cycle and how do we get from disorder to reorder with as much wisdom and skill as possible? And that's where I came up with this term rugged flexibility. And what's interesting is most people hear rugged and flexible and they think of these two things as opposites, to be rugged is to be strong, to be durable, to be stubborn, determined, and to be flexible is to be soft, to be supple, to bend easily without breaking, to be nimble.
Yet, when I looked at high level performers that were able to skillfully navigate change, I found that they exuded equal parts rugged and flexible. So they weren't either or, they were both and, so I coined this term rugged flexibility, which I really think is the essential quality for navigating the allostasis cycle. And I'll say one more thing about the allostasis cycle just because I know y'all, at one point, at least, were in school, were science nerds, many of you still probably are. Once you put the nerd in science, you can't take it out. Researchers have this other term called allostatic load and that describes how much stress or distress an organism experiences between disorder, and reorder in the higher the allostatic load, the worse off.
But they agree that allostatic load is a variable term and it's very much behavioral. So we have some say in what happens between disorder and reorder. And I think that that's really important. It doesn't mean that change is easy, it doesn't mean that we always grow from change, but it does mean that we have some agency in what happens between disorder and reorder. And the first step is just acknowledging, like you said, there's no going back to order. That is an outdated model. The second step is realizing that there are things that we can do, mindsets that we can embrace, to navigate that cycle with as little allostatic load or in layperson's terms as skillfully as possible.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, when I dig into the mindset, that's where you start in the book on flowing with life. And I think, at least I've been guilty of this, seeing change as this threat and you start to lock down and you want to resist. And the reality is you say in the book, "It's not the change itself that causes harm, but it's our slow uptake of it." And then you give just brilliant examples of our obesity epidemic in the United States is because of our inability to adapt to how our food has changed. If you think about how this country embraced a certain method of growing food to support a growing nation, and now I guess a hundred years ago we were all afraid we wouldn't have enough calories, and now we all have way too many calories. And you have other examples. I guess we'll start with what does that mean? What mindset should we be open to in flowing with life versus seeing change as something that we have to resist against?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, the first thing that I would argue is that it's not completely either or, and this is again where rugged flexibility comes from. So in the face of change, I think that there are these two extreme tacks and one tack is go with the flow on everything, be super zen. The other tack is try to control everything, personal responsibility, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, whatever cliche you want to use. And people again fall into these extremes. But I think both are kind of true. We do have agency during change, 99% of the time we have at least some agency, but that agency has limits and we also need to accept those limits. So we need to exert our agency and exert our control where we have it, where it makes sense, but then let go and release from control and go from the flow where we don't.
And I think the biggest trap that people fall into when it comes to change is not updating their expectations to meet reality. So one really powerful model for thinking about how the brain works is as a prediction machine. So the brain is constantly trying to predict what's going to happen next. And this is for good reason, if the brain couldn't put together patterns, we would never make it through the day day, we'd be so inefficient. However, when you think about change, in many ways change is expectations not being met. We thought A was going to happen and B happened or we were coasting along and then there's a coronavirus pandemic. And the longer it takes us to update our expectations for what's happening to match what's happening, the worse off we feel and do. So the shorthand equation that researchers like to use is that our mood or our happiness at any given time equals our reality minus our expectations.
So a big trap is not updating our expectations when things change because one, we don't feel good, and two, we're not engaging with the actual situation, we're engaging with the situation as we thought it would be or we imagined it would be. So one of the examples I use in the book to really bring this to light is a pandemic example. And if we think back, and I'm not meaning to go back to the pandemic too many times here, but as you mentioned, I was writing the book during the Coronavirus pandemic, or at least during the thick of it, and we had a summer in 2021 where we'd been living with the pandemic for almost 18 months. And cases in much of the western world, certainly in America, essentially went down to close to zero. Here where I live in Asheville, North Carolina, maybe two cases per a hundred thousand.
So it very much felt like the pandemic was over. And at first, myself included, we were all cautiously optimistic and hesitant. But then two, three months later, we had a normal summer and most people started to declare victory on the pandemic. And then the Delta wave came and it was a gut punch. And so many people felt worse when the Delta variant hit than they did at the start of the pandemic, even though objectively we were in so much better shape,. We had vaccines, we had therapeutics, we had more knowledge of how the virus transmits and mitigation strategies, yet we still felt worse. And I argue it's because of this expectations not being updated. We had thought, we had expected, that we were smooth sailing, that we'd gotten through this really hard thing and then boom, Delta variant hits. It was very hard to update what we thought was going to happen to match reality.
Dustin Burleson:
It's so powerful and I think in every aspect of life, particularly in running a business, we think there's the way things are going to go or even worse sometimes the way they should go in reality.
Brad Stulberg:
There's another core theme in the book that's not as explicit, but it implicitly runs through so much of what I discovered and what I write, which is non-dual thinking, so not this or that, but this and that. And I grew up in the west. I was classically trained in public health. I'm a professional at linear thinking and linear thinking is really powerful. It underlies the entire enlightenment and scientific method. By definition in science, we try to disprove a hypothesis. So it is very much this or that, and we have statistical tools to help us answer those questions.
So that kind of thinking is good and it's not the only way to think. And often for navigating complex situations and human situations where there's changing variables, we benefit from something called non-dual thinking, which simply says not this or that, but this and that. So back to your point about running a business, it is good to have a plan, it is good to set expectations, it is good to try to will the world to fit your plan, and it's really important to release from the plan when things change and to update the plan to match reality. And both of those things are true at once.
Dustin Burleson:
You highlight in the book core values, which I loved, and it kind of appears on the surface maybe to be a little tricky to balance because I think a lot of people think their core values are like this rugged part of the boundary that shouldn't be flexible, but to be a master of change, I think you're supporting in the book the idea that we do have to marry that with flexibility. How do you reconcile those two? And then I think an important point and question is, do our core values change over our lives? What does the research say about that?
Brad Stulberg:
All right. I like to use the metaphor of a river to think about our identities over time. And this can be our personal identities, but this can also be the identities of our businesses. And there's this famous quote from the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, he says, "You can't step into the same river twice." And what he means by that is the river is always changing and the person that steps into it is always changing. And a couple thousand years later, Bruce Lee says, "Be like water." So we have all these metaphors and all these visualizations of being fluid, being like water because things change. However, part of what makes a river a river is its bank. If a river didn't have a bank, it would just be random water. So I think the metaphor for the bank, these are our core values, these are the things that channel the direction of how we're going to change and evolve over time.
And I think about core values as key qualities and characteristics that we aspire towards that give our lives meaning that when we are practicing these core values, we feel good and we do good. And I think that most people benefit from having a handful, three to five and really concretely defining them. And during times of change, when the path forward is unclear and uncertain, you can ask yourself, well, how would a authentic person go about this situation? How would a creative person, what would someone that values presence, what would someone that values community do? So on and so forth. And core values can help guide us through. So I'll give two examples of core values, first in an individual level and then in an organizational level because I think that this is a really central part of the book. Our core values are our rugged pieces of our identity, but we have to flexibly apply them.
So zoom way out, actually before I get into these stories and think about evolution, like the grandest empirical change that we know of. And when evolutionary biologists study species that survive for a long time, they find that they have these two components. One, they have very robust central features. These are the things that do not change, that make the species what they are. If these central features were to change, the species would no longer be recognizable. So they hold on tight to those central features. However, they apply those central features very flexibly over time and they're willing to adapt, evolve, and grow on everything else. And I hear that and I think one, that's true for evolution, but it's also true for our personal evolution or the evolution of our business. And I think our central features are our core values and then our work is to apply them flexibly.
So an individual who did this remarkably is the tennis player Roger Federer. Greatest tennis player of all time. And what many people don't realize about Federer is that between the ages of 32 and a half and 36, most commentators thought his career was over. They thought age. The change that comes for all of us had finally caught up with Federer. He didn't win a major tournament. He dropped out of many tournaments that he would've won in his sleep. He wasn't really competing very well. And what Federer did during that time period is he stepped back and he said, hey, what are my values? What am I not willing to negotiate on? He came up with things like excellence, competition, love of the game, but how he applied those, he knew he'd have to shift. So he learned a brand new one-handed backhand to take speed off the ball.
He started playing at the net more to shorten points. He completely overhauled how he trained to allow more rest and recovery. And he even gave up the racket that made him the best player to ever live in favor of a new technology that all the younger players were using. And then at age 37, practically a dinosaur in tennis, Roger Federer came back and won two majors and had the best record of his entire career. And when Federer speaks about this, he talks about how he faced this juncture at his career where he knew who he was as a tennis player, but if he didn't change, he would've been selected out in evolutionary terms. He would've had to retire. So he held onto those core values, but he was willing to be so flexible in how he applied them. So that's Roger Federer's longevity.
An organization whose story I tell in the book is the New York Times. And I write this and I'm going to say it too, regardless of your politics or your literary preferences, I want you to hold those for a second. We're not talking about New York Times the editorial part. I want to talk about New York Times the business. And over the last 20 years, so many newspapers have failed. It has been a really hard time for newspapers. You could argue that short of VHS video, no industry has contracted more than newspapers, yet the New York Times has thrived. They're the only newspaper that has substantially grown its revenue and expanded its newsroom and editorial staff. So at a time when so many newspapers are at worst shutting down, at best doing massive layoffs, the New York Times is growing. How did they do it?
The New York Times stepped back and they said, what are our core values? And they identified things like reporting, telling stories no one else is telling, craftspersonship, excellence, integrity, but you know what's not on their core values? A written newspaper that comes on paper delivered by a paper person every morning. So what do the times do? They completely adapted how they applied those core values. And today, the New York Times has three front doors. The first is the website, the second is their newsletters, and the third is their podcast network. But nowhere does the New York Times identify with a print newspaper anymore, but they have the same exact core values that they had 20 years ago. Isn't that fascinating?
Dustin Burleson:
That's huge, yeah.
Brad Stulberg:
So that to me is what rugged flexibility is all about. It's about knowing your values, knowing your sources of ruggedness, but then being willing to use them flexibly and shift how you apply them as things change around you.
Dustin Burleson:
That's so cool. Yeah, it might dovetail into this earlier part of the book that I'm going to mention on mindset and you cite a wonderful book to have or to be from Erich Fromm and that is the idea of having versus being. I think maybe the New York Times could have erroneously thought, well, we have a print newspaper business or Blockbuster video, we have a video store and totally displays without thinking about who they really are. What are they really trying to accomplish? I don't know, it's a little bit of a stretch and taking it back to that part of the book, but I do want to highlight this having versus being, because it really resonated with me and I just wanted to ask, what's the difference and then why is it so important?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, I don't think it's a stretch. I think it's a nice connection. So Erich Fromm defined having as thinking of yourself based on what you have, what you own, your car, your house, your kids, your partner, a certain skill that you might have, a PR in sport, a revenue for your business, the size of your practice, you name it. These things that you have. And he really astutely observed that if you think of yourself based on what you have, yourself, your identity is inherently fragile because the things that you have are eventually going to change. They're never going to stay the same. And when they change, it's going to be really discombobulating. So he suggests that rather than define ourselves by what we have, we should adopt a being orientation. And in a being orientation, we define ourselves by our core values, by what really is essential to us because it's so much more resilient when there's change.
So one example, I'll give an extreme example to make the point, is if a parent defines themselves as having a kid, well what happens when that kid grows up, and if all goes well and moves out of the house and wants more freedom and autonomy? They're going to butt heads and the relationship's going to suffer or that parent is not going to know what to do with themselves when they become an empty nester. Whereas if a parent defines their relationship by being in love with their child or by being a good parent, that is so much more flexible throughout a lifetime's worth of change. So yeah, when we think that we have things, well, it can be really hard to lose those things. And if we over identify with having them, then it can cause us great distress and anxiety. Whereas if we can try to shift our definitions of ourselves to more being attributes, those are much more enduring over time.
Dustin Burleson:
It's so true. It was eyeopening for me in the book to see some of the ways our brains play tricks on us. I'm a rollercoaster junkie, so you give a great example on how when we're going through something difficult, our brain can trick us on how long that time span is. And I think it's the zero gravity thrill amusement park in Dallas where David Eagleman at Baylor University did some research. Can you talk about that? What happens when we're going through something difficult with our perception of time and how we respond to that challenge or that threat?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, it's probably my favorite study in the book because the design is so clever. But before I get into the study, the basic concept is that when we are going through really big, hard changes, it often seems like time slows down. And one example of this that many people, myself included have experienced at some point of their lives is clinical depression or anxiety. And one of the defining features of clinical depression or anxiety is it feels like there is no way out, minutes feel like hours, hours feel like days, days feel like weeks. And as someone that has experienced that, it really does feel like time just slows down. Just getting through a day is like a Herculean effort. Yet if you're fortunate to recover from a clinical depression, as I am so fortunate to have now gotten to the other side of a really bad one, looking back, it doesn't feel like it took that long.
So it's this weird experiential time warp. And I had lived it during my reporting, I've talked to other people that have lived. It's not just depression or anxiety. Another common example is grief, whether that's the loss of a friend, a loved one or being laid off from a job. So all kinds of grieving, but grief, anxiety, depression in a really crappy physical health diagnosis, time slows down. Everyone has this experience. So fast-forward to the study that you mentioned. David Eagleman at Baylor takes participants on a ride that has since shut down probably because it's so fricking dangerous. But essentially people lay on a mattress or a mattress type contraction and they just free fall 200 feet to the ground. And what Eagleman did is he had people guess how long it took to fall while they were both on the ride, while they were falling, and then also while they were watching other people on the ride.
And what he found is that when they were on the ride, they estimated that it took so much longer than when they were watching it. And which prediction do you think is accurate when they were watching it? So he uses this to literally show that our perception of time slows. It's the same free fall, the same drop, but when you're on the ride, it feels like seconds. When you're watching other people on it feels like a split second. So yes, our brain does kind of trick us into hard changes, feeling like they're going to last forever. And what Eagleman and colleagues theorize why this is the case, the mechanism behind this is when we feel like we're under threat or when we feel a lack of stability, we're constantly scanning our environment to try to keep ourselves safe. So instead of viewing life as this continuous flowing movie, we start to view life frame by frame, so it really does slow down.
And the inverse is true. What is one of the defining characteristics, a hallmark of flow experiences? When you're in the zone, when you're experiencing peak performance, time flies. So when we're at our best, we are just truly, that's where the word flow comes from, we are flowing along like we're in this beautiful movie, it's just flowing. However, when things are changing, when we're not at our best, that movie starts to show frame by frame and things slow down. So what I argue is that just knowing this is so important when we're going through big changes because we can take even just a little bit of consolation knowing that what feels like forever now won't feel like forever in the future. We just have to get through.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I just love that example and what a neat research project that would've been to be a part of as well.
Brad Stulberg:
Such a cool, clever experimental design. And then for me as a writer, the literary metaphor is so beautiful, which is when you feel like you're falling, time slows down.
Dustin Burleson:
Literally.
Brad Stulberg:
And what is living through a big change if not feeling like you're free-falling? So it's one of those things too, as a writer where I came across that study, I'm like, God, this is just perfect in so many ways.
Dustin Burleson:
That's so cool. I want to talk about responding versus reacting and maybe this zooming out and becoming more aware of what's going on, like this example, like, okay, I am in the stressful heat of the moment. Something unexpected showed up in the business, a key partner leaves, an associate quits and goes somewhere else and opens up across the street. That moment, I think it's easy to become overwhelmed and fixate on a path we think is going to get us out of there. You talk about a rage pathway versus seeking, and I want to kind of highlight that for the listeners. Can we talk about that?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah. So the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp coined these different pathways in the brain. And one such pathway is what he called the rage pathway. And this is exactly what it sounds like. It's when we are raging, when we are angry, and that anger often turns into despair. It's a very emotionally hot experience. There's another pathway called the seeking pathway, and this is when we are being really thoughtful, when we are problem solving, when we're using our prefrontal cortex, and what Panksepp found is that the rage in seeking pathway, they compete for resources. So it's a zero-sum game. They cannot both be active at the same time. And step back and think about this, of course, it's very hard to be raging and to be pissed off when you're working on solving a problem. And it's almost impossible to productively work on solving a problem when you're pissed off.
So we've all had the experience of realizing how these two pathways are at odds with each other. So I take Panksepp's research in the book and I say, all right, this all makes sense, so how do we try to avoid getting sucked into the rage pathway and activate the seeking pathway? And the construct I have for this is trying to respond, not react. So an unexpected change, like some of the examples that you mentioned happens, and there's these two paths we can go down. One is very reactionary, this is the rage pathway. We panic and then we pummel ahead. We do not create space between the change in our reaction, we just go instinctively. And oftentimes we regret that. We regret what we do when we're in a rage pathway. Alternatively, we can respond and responding is more effortful, so it takes more work, but it's much more thoughtful, it's more discerning and we rarely regret responding to a change.
And I've come up with this framework because every book has to have a framework for responding, I call it the four Ps. So we pause, we process what's happening, we make a plan, and only then do we proceed. And what I love about it is in comparison to the two Ps of reacting, panic and pummel ahead, the four Ps, it's much slower. So it literally slows us down. It gives us a chance to work through those really hot, visceral emotions and be more wise and discerning instead. So when big changes happen, we want to respond, not react. Now listeners might be thinking, I get it, that's a cool framework. That sounds great. How do I actually do it? And here, psychologists recommend affect labeling, which simply means labeling your emotions. So when you catch yourself really hot, just naming it, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling panicked, I feel distress, I feel overwhelmed, I feel excitement, and the simple act of naming and emotion creates some space between you and the emotion.
So it turns on that more effortful thinking, thoughtful part of your brain. So it's really hard to do this, but your associate tells you he's opening a practice or she's opening a practice across the street. Even if it's just a mental note inside your head, I feel heat in my chest, I feel myself getting really angry. Just naming it takes you out of that spiral into anger and then gives you a chance to process what's happening, then plan. So figure out what skills, capabilities, resources can you bring to bear on the situation? What can you control versus what you can't control? And only then move forward and proceed.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, it's huge and it plays out in so many aspects of our lives. I love that you highlighted this boils down to how we consume information. What sort of news are we listening to? Years ago in college talk radio became so inflammatory for my blood pressure's sake and everyone around me is like, I got to turn this off. What do you have to say to people who think, all right, I am in the moment, there's something going on in my life and I've named this, I noticed I'm feeling stressed or I've noticed I'm feeling tired or hungry, giving yourself a little pause. That's one thing. Where else, in addition to media, do you see this playing out for your coaching clients you help, and in society, I think for sure social media seems to come to mind? I'm just curious your thoughts on that.
Brad Stulberg:
Absolutely. So I think there's two ways to go about this. One is internal, which is what we talked about, and that's just practice. You're stuck in traffic, you can respond or react. Your dog has diarrhea while you're rushing out the door, respond or react, your kid melts down, respond or react? So what's nice about this is just even the most average human existence is full of opportunities to practice. And we can do that and we can cultivate that muscle to be a kind of person that responds instead of reacts.
There's also an external way to help us do this. And it's exactly what you said. If you want to be a responsive person, it probably doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time in very reactionary environments. So if you spend all day listening to talk radio or on political Twitter or on the comments of message boards or watching cable news where they bring on two guests that are handpicked to go at each other's throats and then something happens in your life and you think that magically you're going to be really responsive about it, you're going to be really thoughtful, of course you're not, you're primed to react.
And I think it's a really sad state of our politics today is it seems like the goal is just to prime everybody to react. So you can do everything possible to work on the internal muscle of responding, not reacting, but then if you spend all your time in reactionary environments, it's going to be really hard to meet the moment. If you can shift away from that and you can try to surround yourself with more responsive activities, so reading a book instead of being on social media, watching a documentary instead of watching cable news, trying to surround yourself with thoughtful people that listen, they don't just wait to talk, making sure that you have a never read the comments rule or something akin to that. These sorts of things can really help prime you to then be able to respond, not react, when inflammatory situations occur in your own life.
Dustin Burleson:
That's great advice. I also love this concept in the book and I think you're the first person I've heard talk about it, maybe I'm just slow on the uptake on the data, but there's a real trend that I see it everywhere when something bad happens, it's like we have to immediately make meaning out of it and move forward. And you're saying, wait a minute, there's a different way to approach this. How do you see that playing out?
Brad Stulberg:
That's right. This is, I think, a really important part of the book and it kind of gets back to what we were discussing earlier about Eagleman's research and the importance of patience during big, hard changes. Sometimes we can immediately practice gratitude and have a growth mindset and make meaning out of hard things, and that's good when we can do it, but other times we can't. And if we try to force positive thinking or meaning on our experiences, it backfires, turns a negative, like a shitty thing that happened into a double negative. So now there's the shitty thing, and now we're judging ourselves because we can't even do what the self-help books tell us to do. So I think it's important to realize when you're going through something hard that sometimes just getting through is enough. And I looked across different fields and the research definitely has this pattern that shows that we do tend to make meaning and grow from change, but the bigger and harder the change, the longer it takes and that process doesn't happen while we're in the experience, it happens on the other side.
So we don't grow during acute grief. We don't grow during acute depression. We don't grow the week after we get a terrible health prognosis. We grow one week later, two weeks later, two months later, in some cases two years later. And the hardest case is two decades later. So when we're in the thick of that stuff, all that matters is showing up and getting through. And if growth and meaning and positive thinking is going to come, it's got to come on its own time. We cannot force it. And I think so many optimistic type A people, they try to force it. They try to say, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. All the personal development and self-help books say I've got to grow from everything right away. And I just caution people that that has limits.
The worst thing to tell someone that just lost a loved one is write down three things you're grateful for or bad advice to give to someone experiencing depression is just have a growth mindset. Someone had to shut down their dental practice because of a really crappy macroeconomic cycle, probably not wise to tell them, well, can't you think positive? I think it's okay to realize that life is full of hardship and when we're in the thick of that hardship, it's enough to just get through it. And then like I said, yeah, meaning and growth does tend to occur, but we can't force it.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, it's just so powerful because I think somewhere between 99 and a hundred percent of our listeners are type A. So if it resonates with me, it'll probably resonate with all the dentists and orthodontists that tend to be on that side of the fence.
Brad Stulberg:
Well, there's this term called tragic optimism that I write about in the book, and I think this is it because I don't want people to think, well, is Brad just telling me to be like a nihilist or a Debbie downer? No, the answer is no. Tragic optimism was coined by the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, who's very well known for man's search for meaning in existential therapy. He's lesser known for this essay that he wrote called The Case for Tragic Optimism. And in it, Frankl says that life is full of unavoidable tragedy. Frankl was not one to sugarcoat things. He said, there are very big limits to optimism. And he defined three tragedies. The first is pain because we're made of flesh and bone. The second is frustration because we can make plans, we can plan ahead and we can have hopes and dreams and they don't always work out.
And then the third is change in loss because the things that we love, they change and eventually we lose them. So Frankl said that these are inevitable tragedies and the worst thing we can do is bury our heads in the sand or try to outthink positively these inevitable tragedies. He paired tragedy with optimism and he said the work of a mature adult is to acknowledge these tragedies, to practice self-compassion, to give yourself some grace and to try to maintain optimism in an optimistic attitude and outlook, even in spite of, or perhaps because of these tragedies. So it's not tragedy or optimism, back to non-dual thinking, it's tragic optimism. And I have just so thoroughly embraced that attitude since researching and writing about it, because it basically asks us to just open up our emotional and our intellectual aperture to hold space for both of these two things that again, kind of like rugged flexibility, we hear them at first and we think they're opposites, but then we dig a little deeper and they actually go together.
Dustin Burleson:
It seems like we're going to get a lot of practice with it because they're not entirely infrequent. I loved in the book, it was eyeopening, but it was reassuring, you say the research shows on average people will experience 36 disorder events in the course of their adulthood. That's like one every 18 months. And I read that and I thought, that seems about right.
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, that comes from Bruce Feiler. And when I first saw that stat, I also kind of jumped back. But then you look at the examples and there are things like starting school, graduating from school, getting married, getting divorced, having a kid, your kid goes off to school, having another kid, a major injury, recovering from that major injury, starting a business, growing a business, shutting down a business, getting promoted, getting laid off, retiring, meeting a new best friend, distancing from a best friend. And yeah, especially because we experienced some of these things more than one time, it very quickly adds up and it goes right back to this first thesis in the book, which is that change is not a one-off event that happens to us, change is something that we are constantly in conversation with, and I think just that mindset shift is really powerful, realizing that change is the norm in many ways, change is life.
Dustin Burleson:
That's the takeaway I got from your most recent editorial in the New York Times. And then reading the book was just like, this is the thing we all have to get good at, it's not how to straighten teeth better or how to drive more EBITDA to the bottom line, it's how do we become masters of change? That's so, so great. I want to highlight the conclusion. You give five questions and 10 tools for embracing change and developing this rugged flexibility you've coined, which is so smart. I'm curious, what surprised you in developing that list? Because I'm sure the list could have been a hundred things or a thousand things, but pairing it down to five really good questions and 10 really good tools, was there anything that surprised you in the research or maybe something from your own life that's worked well or maybe it didn't work and didn't make the list?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the most surprising, and perhaps because it's so paradoxical, is this notion of diversifying your sense of identity and diversifying the sources of meaning in your life. So it's really easy to kind of buy into this narrative that the key to performance is to go all in on something, to give it your all. And what the research shows is that people that have sustainable excellence, yes, they care very deeply about their pursuit, but it's not the only thing that they do. And this helps them navigate change in a major way. And the metaphor that I use to bring this point to life is if you imagine a house and a house only has one room in it and that room floods, you're kind of screwed. You're going to be very discombobulated. Whereas if your house has a couple rooms, if there's a flood in one room, you can seek refuge in another room.
And I think the same is true for our identities. If we become too narrowly attached to any one component of our life, well then when that one thing inevitably changes, it's going to throw us for such a loop. Whereas if we can keep multiple rooms in our identity house available, then we become much more resilient and much more enduring throughout change. So the story that I tell in the book to bring this point to life is of the speed skater, Nils van der Poel, who won gold medals in the 5K and 10K in the 2022 Olympic Games and also shattered the world record. So he is the best speed skater to ever set foot on the planet. Yet prior to those games, van der Poel was underperforming quite a bit and he asked himself why. And the best answer he could come up with was fear. He was carrying a lot of fear.
And then he said, well, what am I scared of? Why am I so fearful every time I step into the oval? And he realized it's because his entire identity, his entire sense of self was wrapped up in speed skating. There was no Nils van der Poel other than Nils van der Poel the speed skater. So when the lead up to the 2022 games, he did something that no other Olympic athlete had ever done before. He decided to take a normal weekend. So from Friday evening to Monday morning, van der Poel was no longer van der Poel the Olympian, he was just van der Poel the normal person. He went out for beers, he got pizza, he went hiking, he went bowling, he started reading books. He didn't sit on the couch all day getting massages and "recovering", he just lived his life and he developed friends and he developed hobbies, so things outside of sport.
And that allowed him to shed his fear because when he stepped into the oval, that pressure valve was opened up a bit because he knew that there was more to him than just speed skating. And he even writes that that made him rugged in the face of all the changes that are inherent to being an elite athlete, to injuries, to missteps, to aging, to the fact that elite athletes have to retire when many others are in the prime of their career. And it allowed him to skate freely, to play to win instead of playing not to lose.
So I think this notion of diversifying your sense of self is just so important to navigating change, and the paradox is it actually makes most people, the vast majority of people get better at what they do because they release pressure. So if you are a dentist and you run your practice, that's going to be a very big room in your identity house, no doubt about it. And if you want to be excellent and master the craft, whether that's of dentistry or orthodontics or the craft of running a business, or God forbid both, you're going to have to spend a lot of time in that room to be excellent. And that's okay. But you never want to shut doors to the other rooms completely, whether that's the husband or wife room, the parent room, the athlete room, the community member room, the gardener room. It doesn't matter what they are, but just having a couple rooms in your identity house is so important.
Dustin Burleson:
And how often is that true? Unfortunately, sadly true, that like a surgeon who steps away from the OR quickly has a demise in health, or within six months, sometimes, we had surgeons that were still in their eighties practicing and they wouldn't retire finally, either their spouse or someone would force them to, and within six months they were dead. It just totally took the life out of their entire identity by not being able to do that one thing, as you said, I love that analogy or metaphor, the one room flooding. That's exactly what happens.
Brad Stulberg:
And I think though, what I want to really be explicit about and what's fascinating is that the research that I cite in the book shows that not only does it make you mentally healthier and more rugged and flexible in the face of change, such as retirement in the example you just gave, but it makes you better at what you do. And that's the paradox, because we think we fall for this myth of greatness that you have to be completely obsessed, but what happens when you get completely obsessed is you start making poor decisions because your whole world narrows to that thing. You lose perspective. So not only does it support mental health, but it actually supports performance. And I'm not arguing that you should be "balanced". The speed skater, Nils van der Poel, he still trained 40 hours a week Monday to Friday. He worked his ass off. Speed skating was by far the biggest room in his identity house, but he never shut those other doors once he developed them. And that's what I'm arguing for.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I love it. My mentor in dental school, they would pair you up with a faculty member and then with a big brother, big sister, and he was one of the best students in his class. And he did something interesting, kind of like van der Poel, the day before a huge exam when everyone was cramming and studying late into the night, making that bad decision you just referenced, which would then force us to show up seven o'clock in the morning to an exam with very little rest. He had taken a normal day. He would go every time and watch a movie and people couldn't understand.
Mark, you're supposed to be studying. He's like, if I don't know it by now, I'm not going to know it. But what people didn't see is when they were watching movies or when they were at the bar three weeks ago, four weeks ago, six weeks ago, he was diligently studying. And then the night before, he would take a day, get normal sleep, go down to the theater, watch a movie, and none of us understood how he got an A on every test, but he was van der Poeling it.
Brad Stulberg:
Love it. That's such a great example. Yeah, there's always misconceptions. There's performative going all in and working hard, and then there's the real thing. And the real thing requires periods of rest, and it requires diversifying your sense of self.
Dustin Burleson:
I love it. I could talk to you all day. I know our time is limited. I do want to make sure our listeners have a chance to learn more about you. I want them to please go get The Practice of Groundedness and the Master of Change. I want to maybe briefly mention The Practice of Groundedness and how that ties into this book because I think they should be reading both. I'm assuming you would say start with The Practice of Groundedness, yes?
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, I think so. Although you tell me, you're the reader. I'd be curious what you say.
Dustin Burleson:
I like them both.
Brad Stulberg:
Yeah, so I feel like this book is a better book, but that's just because I'm a little bit older and maybe, I hate to say wiser, but maybe 1% wiser at most. But part of me says read them in reverse order to see how the thinking evolve top down. But I think the ultimate answer for readers is pick up the book that you're most curious about and that you're most interested in and start there. But yeah, the books go together. They're definitely complimentary. There's very little overlap, but they support one another.
Dustin Burleson:
And then where can we post show notes? Where's the best place for our listeners to find out more about you?
Brad Stulberg:
Thanks. So my website is just my name, www.bradstulberg.com. The social media that I'm active on is Instagram, and my handle is my name BradStulberg, and then as you mentioned, the new book is Master of Change, How to Excel When Everything Is Changing - Including You, and it's available wherever you get books and in whatever format you prefer, hardcover, ebook, audio, you name it.
Dustin Burleson:
I can't tell you how honored I am that you came on the show. I was laughing with my wife, we often say silly things to each other, like in movie quotes, and it's usually TV and it's usually Seinfeld. But I read your editorial piece in the New York Times, and I quoted Mater from Toy Story, I looked at my wife and I was like, read this, and she read it, she's like, oh my God, that's great. I said, I'd give my left two lug nuts to get this guy on the podcast. And so I'm so grateful that you said yes. And man, hats off. These books are fantastic. I highly recommend everyone get them, read them, share them with your employees, share them with your kids. I think this stuff should be taught at sixth grade as early as possible. So Brad, thank you for writing the books, and thank you for coming on the show.
Brad Stulberg:
Dustin., I really appreciate those kind words and thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Awesome.
Dustin Burleson:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Burleson Box and a special thank you to Brad Stulberg for coming on the show. His books are so great. Please go check out Master of Change and The Practice of Groundedness. If you like today's episode, be sure to leave us a review and click the subscribe button on whatever podcast platform you use to consume podcasts. And be sure to share us with friends, colleagues, and employees. And until next time, take care and be well. I'll see you right here inside the Burleson Box for our next episode.