Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on self-awareness and business savvy. She’s worked directly with 40,000 leaders and spoken to hundreds of thousands more, helping them achieve dramatic and measurable change. Her clients have included the NBA, Walmart, Salesforce, and more, and her TEDx talks have been viewed more than 10 million times. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Insight and her latest, Shatterproof, which publishes this week. Tasha joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about Shatterproof, the role of resilience in life and leadership, and antifragility.
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Dr. Tasha Eurich On Becoming Shatterproof
Our quote for this episode is from Neil Blumenthal. “The key to an ideal workplace is one hyphenated word, this. Self-awareness.” Our guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich, is an Organizational Psychologist, one of the world’s leading experts on self-awareness and business savvy. She’s worked directly with 40,000 leaders and spoken to hundreds of thousands more, helping them achieve dramatic and measurable change. Her clients have included the NBA, Walmart, Salesforce and many more, and her TEDx Talks have been viewed more than 10 million times. She’s also the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Insight and her latest, Shatterproof. Tasha, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Bob. It’s such a pleasure.
How Leadership Has Evolved Since COVID-19
All right, so like many of the guests who are coming back, you’ve previously been on the show and so I’d encourage people to read that episode, but that was way back in 2020, pre all of the things on COVID. Obviously, there have been a few significant years in leadership, both in business and outside of it. What do you think has changed the most since our period of COVID and are things getting better or are they getting worse?
I don’t have good news here, but I sense that all of your readers already know that in their gut. You’re exactly right. What’s interesting actually is in the process of writing my new book Shatterproof, I actually went and looked at some quantitative measures of the level of uncertainty and chaos that exist in the world. Very fun for me.
There’s one called the Global Uncertainty Index. Even before COVID, we have been living in what I call the chaos era. It’s an age of increasingly chronic and compounding stress across multiple areas of our lives. If you look at the Global Uncertainty Index, basically what it shows is obviously COVID it went crazy, but it hasn’t gone down, it’s gone up since then. The baseline for most of us in our daily lives is a higher than we used to have like baseline of stress.
Plus, the fatigue. It seems like everyone’s burnt out. I just did a huge assessment project for a civic organization that delivers medical services. I’ll just say that. The level of burnout was shocking to me.
It’s a whole new world. It’s interesting because I think part of it was we all felt like when COVID was over, we would go back to normal, whatever that was. That’s just not the world we live in. That’s part of why I’m so passionate about sharing the message of this book. It actually helped me, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this. It saved my life from a health crisis, but we have to find a new way to cope because the things that we have been taught, you tell me they’re not working anymore. We’re not seeing them work.
No. You don’t know this. You and I haven’t talked about this, but my book that will come out that I’m working on, the working title is Elevate Your Kids. I’ve actually been trying to look at parenting through a leadership lens and I’ve been studying data for six months. Is what we’re doing with kids working and does it match up at all to what we know is good leadership in the workplace?
The answer is no and no. The mental health, the fragility, it’s a huge problem raising kids for the world now. They’re showing up in the workplace with these attributes and then it’s another problem. It’s great timing on this because I have been seeped in this data. We’ve probably seen some of the same stuff and I just want to scream like, “This isn’t working.”
Every study I’m reading like, “This isn’t working. Why are we doing this?” I had a line in here about talking to you about the new book and you talk about this concept of resilience and intrinsic motivation and I think these are the two things we’ve lost the most in a whole generation. All carrots and extrinsic motivation and the inability to overcome any setback because the culture is about perfectionism and getting everything right.
I don’t know how old your kids are, mine are all around college age. I’m in and around this. By no means do I think, particularly after the last few years, that going to an elite university is the pinnacle of anything anymore. If you get one B-plus grade, you can pretty much check twenty schools off your list. The message that that sends and the behaviors that that creates are pretty profound.
It’s true. One thing we know when we look at life success is that grades don’t always predict it. We’re using the wrong metric anyway.
You’re going to have mistakes and you’re going to have failure. The longer you are delayed exposed to those, this is Taleb’s Antifragile, the less you have ability to even handle that stuff.
That’s the idea. It’s called the stress inoculation hypothesis where if we don’t get a little bit of stress when we’re developing and just in general, we’re not going to be able to deal with it. However, the other side of that is also true, which is when these kids in these young people get into the world, they are finding a world that has so much chaos and so much stress. Not only did they not develop those skills, but this is why we’re all exhausted is. It’s this repeated crisis after crisis, headline after headline. Resilience wasn’t designed to do that. It was designed for short-term crises that we get through and then we go back to normal.
It’s similar to using fight or flight all day long. It wasn’t designed for that. It was designed for bear, like save your life, fill your system with all these chemicals and get you to run. It’s interesting, as you said that, I realized there is some dichotomy. First of all, it’s interesting. The other thing happens too, when people retire and they have no stress, they die quickly, a lot of them, very much. We seem to have it in the wrong place. We have no stress in these emotional social situations that we allow people to have. We just induce stress in all these academic performative situations.
We self-induce stress. I don’t know about you, but I’m an amazing master at self-inducing stress.
Resilience As A Limited Resource
Talk to me about your ascertain, which I agree with fully, is that resilience is a limited resource. Why do you think that and what does that mean in reality for people?
Let me first give a definition of resilience because I think it’s like the term communication. We all use it and we mean different things. The way researchers define resilience is the capacity to cope with hard things. It’s not a skill. It’s really a capacity that we have. There are a lot of myths. I think in the translation between what all the empirical research says and what we’re talking about in the world, there’s been this, it’s like a game of telephone where the message of the research has gotten distorted.
I think in terms of resilience, the way we’ve all been taught to grow our capacity to cope, the practices of like optimism, gratitude, self-care, making sure we’re sleeping. What’s happening is we’re all doing all of these things to the best of our ability and we’ve reached a point where it’s not working anymore. That was actually what led me to really dive into this research for my book.
I’ve been researching it for five years. At the same time, I was going through that experience myself where I was learning in the research, for example, that resilience isn’t intended to help us thrive. It is intended to help us survive. In my life, I was feeling that way. I even made a principal spreadsheet of all my resilience practices because I was in so much trouble.
Grades don’t always predict success, so we’re using the wrong metric.
It’s just what gets you to come back another day and not quit. It’s not like you’re like loving the door slammed in my face all day.
Exactly. I think we expect that if we do all these things, then if we pay the price by spending the time and the energy, we’re going to get the return and that’s just not true. A couple of other misconceptions that exist is I think that resilience is something that we all have been told we can learn. We can dramatically improve. If we just sit on our yoga mat enough for enough time, we’ll be able to deal with whatever comes at us. What we know is that each person has a limit to their resilience. For people particularly who have had early childhood trauma or who have just had a very difficult life, it’s actually harder for them to be resilient. It’s not easier.
There’s not enough in too much.
The last thing is the research does not tell us what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It actually says what doesn’t kill you is going to deplete your resilience and make it harder to cope with the next thing. When we look at all of this research put together, it’s like no wonder we are doing all of this stuff and then not feeling what we think we’re supposed to be feeling. It’s because resilience was never really promised to do any of those things.
It goes along the research around willpower. I always liked the example that if you don’t want to drink and you live in a town where everyone goes out drinking every night like, that is really going to require a lot of power not to drink rather than going out with a group that goes walking at night. The environment matters a lot to this too. If you put yourself in situations where you have to deplete willpower or resistance, which seemed like cousins, again, it takes a lot of work to go to a bar and be like, “Should I have a drink? Should I not have a drink?” If we’re out playing tennis, I’m not even thinking about that.
I think that’s a really good comparison. That’s the premise of my book too. Instead of making ourselves push through and push through the being at the bar with all of your friends drinking, it’s about stepping back and saying, “What’s really going on here? How’s it impacting me? What do I need? How can I design my life to be more in line with what those needs are?” That can be little things like, “How am I going to structure my to-do list today,” or it can be big things like, “Do I want to stay in this marriage or not?” I think you’re exactly right. We fly along with the wind sometimes and we forget that we actually have more latitude than we think to design a lot of parts of our lives.
You can’t do everything and you can’t apply it to everything. This is the problem with excellence and all of this stuff. I’ll read you one of my favorite quotes that I used in my book on resilience. I don’t know if you’ve heard it because I think this was a really unusual take. You know Elizabeth Edwards was John Edwards’s wife who had cancer. He was running for president and he was openly cheating on her. She said, “Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable over something that matters or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn’t matter.”
What does that mean to you?
That means to me like I actually think there’s some things we need to not be resilient about. To your thing of using it up, there’s some stuff you just have to quit and there’s stuff you shouldn’t be resilient about. The stuff that really ties to your values and that matters and your goals and that you would die on the hill, and then the other stuff is like, to me, again, you’re wasting your tank on the other stuff.
There’s a term that I talk about called costly persistence. One of the dark sides of resilience is, to your point, we apply it to everything when it’s like, “I’m in this toxic friendship and every time I talk to this person I feel miserable,” or, “I have this boss that no matter what I do, they make me miserable.” We don’t have power over everything in our lives because that’s not how life works. We have so much more power than I think we give ourselves credit for.
I thought Annie Duke’s book on quitting was excellent on this too, in figuring out where you should quit. There’s so much bias to the early quitters because you have no idea how it’s going to work out. She’s like, “We are chastised for quitting too early and we are chastised for quitting too late,” because assuming that it would’ve worked out. When we talk about this, I think everyone’s just trying to do too much. There’s too much information, too much exposure. If you want to get in school, you’ve got to do all these activities. They’re just wasting their gas on stuff that doesn’t matter.
It’s like no wonder we’re also exhausted because that plus the increasing world of chaos that we live in equals nothing good at the end of the day.
Managing Chaos And Media Influence
Let’s talk about the world of chaos because I was in a debate with an unnamed person who’s talking about the gloom and doom and the world falling into politics and all this stuff. I was like, “If you just turned off the news, you wouldn’t feel any of this. Your neighborhood isn’t on fire. Stuff isn’t happening. If you walked outside, you wouldn’t even know who’s president if you talked to someone or otherwise.” There is a real thing around the locus of control on this. The news seems to be the thing that if you want to deplete your gas tank, whatever your poison is, you can turn on Fox or MSNBC. I don’t think it matters, but it’s going to wear you down.
That’s one of the examples I think of something that we can control and something that isn’t a given. It’s funny. Long story, but speaking of the world of constant chaos, in January 2025, my beloved condo flooded by the condo above me and I’m living here in this rented place through probably the fall. Here, I don’t have TV in the area where I get ready and so I just haven’t been watching the news and I feel like a completely different person. I know it’s there and my life is definitely chaotic in all of the other ways. It was interesting that it took something that I didn’t even decide to do to show me how much better even just my mornings could be.
Replenishing Resilience: What Research Says
Someone I know years ago was really challenging someone on global warming. They were stressed about it and they were like, “Why are you stressed? Either you can do something about it or you can’t do something about it.” The quote was, “If you control it, why worry about it? If you don’t control it, why worry about it?” A lot of this is induced. I know you touched on this, but from the research, what does the replenishment cycle look like once it’s exhausted? Is it harder to replenish? What does the research say?
What doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. It depletes your resilience and makes it harder to cope with the next thing.
I do want to go back to the point you just made though because I think there’s another nuance to this which is I call grit gaslighting. We’re hard on ourselves when we can’t get through things and we say, “Why am I so stressed out about global warming and why everybody else seems to be living their lives?” Actually, one of the first step of the four-step framework that I talk about in Shatterproof to learn to thrive in this world is to pay attention to our pain. Not in an appreciative way, but to instead of pushing through those feelings to be like, “What’s this about? What’s going on here? What are the patterns that I can find?” Maybe we can go into that. I think there’s another side of this where we force ourselves to push through things emotionally.
We were talking about values in a group and someone said something really profound and they were like, “There’s understanding your values and what you care about.” There’s understanding like which battles it’s worth bringing it to and it’s not. You cannot boil the ocean. Let’s say you believe in truth. There are a couple of core truths or lies, but if you tried to spend your whole life, you’d exhaust yourself.
It’s the same thing. I think everyone has to have a charitable philosophy because there are more amazing charities, but just say, “I’m so sorry, but we focus on pediatric illnesses as a family and there are all kinds of worthwhile and it’s amazing this way. I know how to look at these, I know how to assess them. Actually, I get stressed being asked to compare every charity in the world to every charity in the world.” This global information thing that we have, sometimes you bring it back to your local community level. I have very strong values, but I thought it was an interesting point. If I tried to fight every battle in the world that was against those, I’d be dead in five years.
You can’t do it. I think like as the world gets more chaotic, the onus is on us to get more focused and more in tune with what’s going on in terms of how we’re reacting to it. I totally agree.
What is that bringing out for me? Why am I overreacting to this? Why does this make me really upset?
What triggers in my environment are causing this and what can those triggers tell me about my reactions? Sorry, I didn’t want to shortchange your great question earlier, which was what happens when we get to that point where our coping just isn’t working anymore. I came up with a term for this largely because I had experienced it myself in this research program. Also, because in our interviews and our quantitative research, we just kept finding over and over again that people’s resilience didn’t necessarily predict how well they were managing things.
The term I came up with is the resilience ceiling. There’s this idea that we’re pushing and pushing and there’s all these coffee mugs that say like, “You’ve survived every challenge so far.” That doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to come a moment and it’s usually when we least expect it and we can least afford it when we reach the limit of what we can endure.
You can too use the expression like something can knock us over with the weight of a feather where we’re fine until the second we’re not. When we hit our resilience ceiling, especially for my fellow stressed-out strivers, people like you and I who are like killing ourselves trying to do great things. Launch books, who would do such a thing? It’s my third time. You think I would’ve learned.
That’s when we start grit gaslighting ourselves and saying, “I can’t believe I just lost my mind about the smallest thing. What’s wrong with me?” That becomes a self-perpetuating cycle and it’s really disarming. It’s really shame-filled. At least, that was my experience. I think it’s important that we have names for these things to normalize them. I had never heard anyone really explain it. People talk about burnout, but I think there are some key differences between burnout and hitting a resilient ceiling.
Burnout is specifically related to work. It’s more ongoing. It’s more chronic. The resilience ceiling is like literally, I woke up this morning and I thought I was going to be okay and I can no longer deal. Maybe that will give us all comfort to know that it’s not just you. You’re not the only person that’s done that and that’s had that experience.
What occurred to me, combining two things that you said, that if we’re red lining it all the time, we’re lowering the ceiling. If we’re taking breaks and doing the things we need to do and restore, we’re probably increasing. It’s probably like a function on my whoop of like it’s like your recovery level where it says, “Your recovery is crappy today. Don’t push it.” Other days, it’s like, “Go full bore. You’re fully recovered.” There’s probably some corollary there to our level of resilience.
I think that’s a really good analogy, actually. The other thing we could say is like it’s a marathon and not a sprint. If we’re waking up every day sprinting and sprinting and then suddenly, we fall over on the ground, it’s no wonder. There’s actually a tool that I talk about in the book that I use almost every day in some sense I call it the 2-2-2 method. Because everybody knows that moment. You’re fine, then you get an email from a client.
It’s the straw.
Yeah. The idea is you prioritize what is going to help replenish you in the next 2 minutes, 2 hours and 2 days. Two minutes is immediate relief, like deep breathing, a primal scream, going outside, letting the sun hit your face for two minutes. Two hours is more short-term psychological first aid. Maybe you go to the gym, maybe you call a friend, maybe you decide to leave work early that day. Two days, what’s really interesting about this is I think all of our fellow stressed out strivers, we like to try to jump in and immediately solve the thing at the moment we’re hitting our resilience ceiling, but that’s probably not the best idea.
Walk away, increase the ceiling. That’s the better strategy.
We don’t have power over everything in our lives, but we have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for.
That’s it. Walk away, put a boundary around agonizing, worrying, stressing. If you can afford to say, “I will come back to this in 48 hours.” Usually by that time, when I use this tool, I’m like, “I have a different framing, I have a different perspective,” because our brains knock this stuff around anyway without us thinking about it.
You’re connecting a lot of dots for me. Dan Pink wrote this book When. One of the things that I talk about a lot in one of my keynotes is what you’ll do for your life if you turn off the phone an hour and a half before bed. Just don’t look at it. As someone who’s been in client service for many years, it’s because you get some bad news email at 10:30 at night, you’re tired, you want to go to bed and then you’re writing the response in your dream. Just seeing it brings you down and your capacity is just lower then. It’s like it’s 10:00 at night, your resistance is low, you’re tired. Even just exposing yourself to the stuff. It’s not going anywhere. You never lost out on a $10 million inheritance from 10:00 PM to 8:00 AM in the morning.
I’ve noticed that. It’s funny, on the other side of it too, I’ve started checking my email when I wake up. I didn’t do that. I had the luxury of not doing that when I wasn’t promoting a book. Now it’s like, “The Today Show wants you to be on late,” so I just have been doing that I’ve noticed my baseline level of stress has increased at the beginning of the day. I don’t think I would’ve put that together if I hadn’t heard you say that. I think there’s the beginning and the end of the day. Maybe those are the sacred times.
You’re not doing The Miracle Morning.
No, I’m doing the miserable morning.
Harnessing Resilience For Future Growth
You should work with Hal. Maybe he’ll write a new book on that. He’s got a whole successor series. You also said something about interesting, I think, like harnessing it for going forward rather than bouncing back.
That’s the heart of this book. Whether or not we enjoy hard moments, they present us with a really unique opportunity to build a better life. That’s in big and small ways. The idea here is if we keep focusing on just surviving and being resilient and bouncing back, who wants to bounce back to where you were before, when you grow forward there’s something better?
That’s the idea that if we can use these moments as a way to reflect, as a way to figure out, “What is it that I need and how can I design my life within these constraints? How can I mindfully pivot,” then we are changed by the situation. I think this idea that we all have is what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, you’ll automatically get better and stronger and faster and happier. You just don’t.
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger eventually. That should be the comma/eventually. Maybe not tomorrow.
Here’s one of my favorite stories in the book that my research assistant John actually found. That quote is an aphorism, but Frederick Nietzsche, the philosopher, was who we were able to trace that to. The backstory of this was less than six months after he published this aphorism, he was walking in a square in turn and saw somebody beating a horse. It’s horrible. Basically, from that moment, he ran over to the horse and was crying. The police were called. From there he was brought home and literally descended into madness. He was checked into a mental institution from which he never reemerged.
There should be an asterisk on that quote.
It’s horrible, first of all, but I think it’s so, so powerful in terms of how much we want that to be true doesn’t make it true. We can grow through these things. We just can’t sit back and try to wake up every day and keep pushing through and expect that that’s going to happen. The good news is it’s actually the framework is pretty simple to get there but we have to proactively do something we have to think about like proactive transformation.
Parenting Today And Intrinsic Motivation
I want to go back to something we talked about earlier. The method of parenting nowadays, I’ve coined it POF, Permissive and Over-Functioning at the same time, which is a toxic cocktail. One of the biggest things, we have destroyed intrinsic motivation. It is, “Chase this thing. I sucked at sports as a kid so I’m putting you in all these sports programs. You’ve got to get all these in every class.” It’s very hard to figure out what you like and what you enjoy. That’s the thing you’re actually going to do all the hard work on.
This is why valedictorians underperform because they’re performative. They do well on everything. I promise you, some of the best people in the world, if they were in arts, they didn’t care about chemistry and science and vice versa. It’s hard to be good at everything. I just feel like we’ve totally destroyed it. You talk about this concept, Mustivation. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Is that okay?
Yes. It’s a very technical word that I came up with, Mustivation. It’s doing things because we have to and not because we want to. When we do that, it thwarts our three biologically programmed human needs that create intrinsic motivation and that is feeling confident in what we’re doing like, “I’m doing well and I’m getting better.” Number two is choice, like having a sense of authenticity and agency. Three is connection, which is feeling belonging and mutually supportive relationships. Anytime we’re doing something that is not who we are that is an obligation, and not to say that we always have control over that. We choose to do those things.
There’s some things you got to do. This goes way too far in society. Some things, you just got to do. You’ve got to sit down and be quiet in class for a half hour and not jump off the desk in a Tarzan swing.
Let’s keep this example going of a high school student that wants to get into a really good college who maybe takes on an extracurricular that they hate but that is going to look good on their resume or their application. I think that’s another example. To your point, we have things we have to do out of Mustivation, but what are those things that I am freely choosing because I’m not thinking them through?
We should limit those to what’s absolutely. You see this. There’s incredible burnout. I live a soccer town and these kids are doing these club and academy programs 5, 6 days a week. Aside from all the repetitive injury stuff, they’re like quitting soccer at seven. All the joy is gone. I remember Tim Ferriss saying like, “To really be great at something, you’ve got to love practice.”
Michael Phelps probably loved practicing swimming. It wasn’t a chore because it wasn’t something that told them we had to do. The problem with all this is our achievement culture is that you’ve got to try some stuff and fail and it’s okay. If I was a college looking at a kid and I would be like, “Tasha tried these ten things and the stuff that she didn’t like, like she’s not good at, and the stuff that she loved, this is where time flies and you’re super resilient and you want to solve the problem.” However, we’re so worried about the other stuff or the average rather than you’ve got to do well on the stuff that you liked and did not the stuff that you tried and didn’t care about.
You just hit the nail on the head. That’s the premise here. When we focus on fulfilling those three needs, confidence, choice and connection, it feeds our resilience, it helps us find joy and it increases the size of our tank in terms of what we’re able to cope with. It’s like it’s all the benefits of resilience plus all of the good things like peace, purpose, joy, meaning, and we lose sight of it, I think. It’s really interesting because these three needs are literally, humans are hardwired.
Our school systems are just not doing these. Do you want to blow up schools?
I do. I call these the three to thrive needs. It’s not this like self-serving, self-indulgent idea. Human beings are wired in the same way that if we don’t have food and water, that’s all we can focus on. If we don’t have these needs met, there’s this whole process that happens where we start to develop these shadow behaviors, goals and habits like that don’t help us achieve those needs, and then we get in the cycle. I think the example with young people nowadays is really apt. Maybe this book will help some schools say, “We are pushing these children to build lives that they will hate.”
To what? To get into Columbia? Does that look so great these days? To then find out that there are no jobs because AI is doing all the stuff that you were told for the last ten years that was a perfect life. I like combining this with the trying in the grid and Angela Duckworth. If we just said, “You’ve got to try something.” By the way, you’re bad at it initially. Initially, everything doesn’t feel good when you first do it because you’re bad, unless your talent matches up right away.
You’ve got to fight through it, finish the semester, finish the whatever. If it’s not your thing, then you cut it and you move on. You’ve got to be short-term gritty but then figure out the ones that you like and then that’s the stuff you are going to double down on. There’s a big difference between, “Mom, I want to do club soccer because I really want to be great at this,” and, “If you don’t start club soccer, you’re going to be way behind your class peers at seven years old.” That is just a difference. One is extrinsic and one is intrinsic.
It really is that simple. I think we’ve all lost sight of that. This is it.
This is the whole Montessori model. Find out what the kid likes and reinforce that.
There’s a reason that those kids are so happy and successful. It’s designed around fulfilling their fundamental human needs.
Overview Of Frameworks And Tools
I know you said you have four frameworks, 24 tools, 12 assessments. We’re not going to give people the book here, but give them a little high level of what they can expect with it.
The first thing, I was sharing this before we started recording, but this is a Bob Glazer exclusive. This is the first time I’ve had the finished book in my hands.
You should have seen if they could have done a glass cover for you.
This was actually a surprisingly hard cover for us to come up with because we realized we couldn’t be super literal.
You can’t do paperback. It just wouldn’t be right.
As the world gets more chaotic, the onus is on us to get more focused and in tune with how we’re reacting to it.
That’s a really good point. I will argue that with my publisher. I’m sure they’ll love it. The book is, it really is designed around this idea of instead of pushing through all the stuff that’s hard, use it to find new ways to fulfill those three fundamental needs. I talk about the four steps of the Shatterproof roadmap. It’s really designed to be, “I’m having a problem. I’m struggling with something. What do I need to do? What habit do I need to engage?”
It talks about these four steps. I mentioned one of them earlier. It starts with probing your pain and just trying to understand, “What’s going on with me here? I’m not going to push through it. I’m not going to push it down. I’m going to pay attention to my pain and figure out what it’s trying to tell me.” The second is tracing your triggers. We already talked about this, looking in our environment and being like, “What is causing this?”
Look backwards in your life.
Exactly, because sometimes those triggers are old. I tell a funny story about that with mine. Once we’ve probed our pain, we’ve traced our triggers, we’re like, “I’ve noticed that these couple of things consistently make me hit my resilient ceiling. You start to say, “When that happens, how can I spot my shadows?” That is the third step. How do I see how I’m unintentionally, through no fault of my own, as a human being reacting to my needs being thwarted, how am I getting in my own way?” What I’ve discovered in my research and others’ research as well is that when our needs are thwarted, we become this worst version of ourselves and we get in our own way and things spiral.
Are we clear about our needs, though, in those cases or are we not?
If you use the Shatterproof roadmap, you will be. Let’s stay with this young people example because I really like getting into this. A high school girl who is shunned by her social group. Her need for connection is being destroyed. She might, as a response, not a conscious response, but as a response decide she wants to get famous on social media. It’s like a poor substitute for connection but the difference is intrinsic versus extrinsic.
When we start to chase these extrinsic substitutes, that’s what spotting your shadows. It’s about saying, “I felt this way. This was happening in my environment and I started to chase this. That’s interesting. What would happen?” The fourth thing is picking or pivots. “What would it look like for me to actually find real connection?” It’s like, “Okay, my friend group doesn’t want to talk to me. Fine. Can I connect with a family member? Can I get in touch with a cousin that I haven’t talked to that I really like?”
I assume people with strong relationships are more resilient. The more isolated you are, the worse it’s going to be.
When our needs are met, our resilience ceiling increases exponentially. That’s the beauty of this. If you follow the Shatterproof framework, you’re developing a second skillset to resilience. In doing that, you’re also growing your resilience.
Different School Approaches To Tough Times
Let me ask you this example because it happened in October after the election. I think the Fieldston School in New York, you heard of this, but one of the more prestigious schools in the country, declared two days after the election they knew people were going to be super distraught. This is an elementary school. “You don’t need to come to school the next day and mental health counselors will be made available for you.” These are like the wealthiest, most resourced kids.
Not for the parents, but for the kids?
For the kids. Another school I heard about, it doesn’t sound very Shatterproof.
I don’t know what it sounds like that broke my brain, but keep going.
A lot of people are like, “You don’t understand people if the preferred candidate loses. People are going to be traumatized and whatever,” which I think was very clear what they meant. Another school, actually a private school in a different place said, “No classes the day after the election. We know everyone’s in a federal space, but you’re coming to school and we’re actually going to set up some conversations and we’re going to talk about this and we’re going to debate and discuss and respect that there’s a lot of emotions going on, but we’re going to try to converse through that.” What is your take on those two approaches and how they fit into your framework?
I’m hesitant to officially weigh in on the first example because I don’t have a background in education. I’m not an expert. Maybe there is research and I think it had been not a school of very privileged.
Yes. The most privileged school in New York.
When we focus on fulfilling these three needs: confidence, choice, and connection, it feeds our resilience and helps us find joy.
I’m going to brush past that. I like the second example a lot. That is very Shatterproof. Instead of saying like, “Just don’t come to school,” it’s saying, “No, come to school. Show up. We’re going to probe our pain. We’re going to trace our triggers. We’re going to do this work.”
Try to lower the bar and the temperature that’s causing us a lot of this.
Here’s actually something I talk about in the book. There’s this whole notion of triggers and the word has started to mean something different. It started off as like, “I had a trauma and this is triggering me and now somebody bumped into me in the grocery store and I feel triggered.” It’s a big range. In that second example, what I think you’re helping people do is not avoid triggers that they can approach and deal with. What we found in all the research on this is usually, you can’t avoid your triggers forever. It’s the same idea as like exposure therapy, so showing up and talking about it.
All of these schools and colleges have been instituting stuff that goes all against the literature on cognitive behavioral therapy, which says like, “Don’t be exposed to it at all if it would bother you.” Literally, the data says trigger warning is to create more stigma in the educational setting saying, “This is going to be a really upsetting thing to talk about.” You actually go through the pain twice, I think.
A trigger warning is just saying that what is about to happen is enough if somebody’s really had a trauma to trigger that. There’s no great answer for that, in my opinion.
It seems like more engagement too around people. A lot of what’s making us not resilient these days is people. People who we disagree with or otherwise. It seems like you could go in for a fight, which I always like. Tell me why you think that. Why do you believe that? I’m curious.
I did that once with an old childhood friend with the complete opposite political beliefs of me and it ended with us hugging and crying and talking about how much we loved each other. It was so beautiful. I still really disagree with him.
He probably had a lived experience that was possibly a different perspective than yours, right?
Exactly. At the end of the day, though, what were our values? Our values were the same. I don’t want to minimize the scale of political differences that we’re all facing, but I agree with you what I try to do on my best days, and I have a lot of worst days, just to be really clear. What I try to do on my best days is find the places where we can agree and find the things we can agree on. If we disagree on 98%, but there’s 2% that’s really important that we can align around, let’s start there. If we all did that a little bit more, I think things might be different.
This isn’t a political conversation, but you have to talk about this because this is the source of a lot of people’s stress right now.
It’s thwarting confidence, choice and connection. Most connection. Yeah, I agree with you. I think most people would probably agree that we can’t go on like this and it’s not working. Maybe we start there with that agreement.
Burnout And Change: Is A Fresh Start The Answer?
I’ve heard a lot of people, they’re burnt out. They’re burnt out. That’s been years. I actually think there’s good change. Let’s say, “I’m in the wrong field. I’m with the wrong people, I realize that,” but the other people who just think that like the change is going to solve the burnout. I’m always like, “Eh.” In fact, a new job requires all new relationships. It’s now the devil you don’t know versus the devil you do know. I’m just not sure that change will bring you everything you’re hoping for.
It’s not that you’re saying anything’s horrible about the current environment, but that you’re just exhausted. What do you do when the tank’s just low and the resilience is low, where I think a lot of people are feeling now? There’s not an obvious like, “I’m in this horrible situation and if I change the situation, it will get better.”
This is the rub, I think. We see only two options in this case, which is stay and stay is waking up, gutting through, doing the same things, having the same experience or run away. Maybe we’re running towards something, but we see that, but there’s a third option. The third option is running this problem through the Shatterproof framework to say, “Are there things in this environment that I can proactively focus on that are going to make this experience better for me, even for the time being?”
Maybe the third option is, “I know I’m not going to be in this job forever, but I also know, to your point, that if I jump to something, it might be worse and it might make me more burnt out. Can I buy myself some time and energy staying where I am so that I can look after my own psychological first aid while I figure out what is that right thing?”
You need to change something micro, not something macro or maybe multiple things that are micro and not macro.
When our needs are thwarted, we become the worst version of ourselves and get in our own way.
You need to have insight. You need to have insight about what is this stirring up on you? What are the things in your environment that are triggering it? How are you getting in your own way? What can you do within the constraints you operate in to better meet your needs? It’s actually been a pretty remarkable experience to work on this book. We haven’t really gotten into this, but I, at the time, like came to and back from the literally the brink of death from this.
I was going to ask you, so let’s hear your story about this.
I haven’t told this very often. You’re one of my first shows, but I’ll keep it brief because I think the details might not matter so much. I’ve lived a life where I just lived on adrenaline and starting in March of 2020, just like all of us, I wasn’t traveling 250,000 miles a year. I wasn’t always out doing things. I was in my apartment with my husband at the time and I crashed. First, I crashed psychologically and then I crashed physically.
I crashed physically to the point where by 2021, with the exception of dragging myself out of bed for a 24-hour trip for a keynote and then going back, I was completely bedridden. What I was able to do with this framework was, because essentially, what I tried to do for the first year and a half of this was gut through and be resilient.
I mentioned my resilience spreadsheet that I had. It was also a genetic, connective tissue disease where all of my systems slowly collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. I’ll get to that. I was trying to just gut through and I was just going to doctor after doctor, waiting for the Dr. House to come and be like, “I’ve spent the last seven days of my free time researching all of your symptoms and I have now found your rare disease.”
What I discovered, it was literally in line and in the same journey as this research program that I was leading about how do we bounce back from bad things was learning the Shatterproof framework. I started applying it to my own life. What I realized was there was no cavalry that was going to come save me. If I kept gritting through, the worst-case scenario was too horrible to speak of. The best-case scenario is I just keep living this life where I was just existing and I was in 10 out of 10 pain every day, and every time I got out of bed, I would faint. These were real physical symptoms.
You can’t just plow through that.
No, and yet I did for about a year and a half, which is crazy. What I ended up doing was when I used this framework, the pivot that I chose to better meet my needs and to put my health above everything else and save my own life essentially, was I was going to spend 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases until I had some insider hypothesis to take to a specialist. It took me a while. They’re like 5,000 rare diseases.
Is this before ChatGPT?
It was before ChatGPT.
It probably would’ve been five minutes after that.
Bob, don’t tell me that. God, that’s horrible.
No. You wouldn’t have had the book.
That’s true. The book wouldn’t be as good. Eventually, I found something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disease. Collagen and elastin are proteins that are found in your entire body, every single system and my body doesn’t know how to produce it correctly. It leads to these diffuse multi-systemic symptoms that no doctor can put together.
It took me a couple of tries because most doctors are taught that they will never see a case in their lifetime so they shouldn’t even bother trying to diagnose it because it’s so rare that they’ll never see it. After my third try, I got a diagnosis. There’s no treatment and there’s no cure and it’s chronic and degenerative. The life expectancy is still usually the same.
You just have to be careful.
I take 52 pills a day. I see a physical therapist every week. I had an operation that unclogged a 95% blocked jugular vein, which seems important, but all of these things together, I never would have had this sense of empowerment and choice and urgency if it wasn’t for the work that I was doing on this book. When I tell people I’m passionate about this and it saved my life, it’s like, “Okay.”
You’re also a client.
Exactly. I love that reference.
All right, we’re going to leave it with that. I’m sure people can just get the book wherever books are sold.
Wherever books are sold, and if they want to learn more, they can go to Shatterproof-Book.com. If you want to see how close you are to your resilience ceiling, go to that website and there’s a free quiz that’ll show you.
If people want to learn more about you or your work in general, where else should they go?
I’m too findable. They can go anywhere.
All right. Figure out how to spell her name and you’ll find her online. Tasha, thanks for joining us and congrats on Shatterproof and I think it’s something the world needs right now.
Thank you, Bob. It’s always a pleasure.
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All right, to our readers, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d really appreciate if you could leave us a rating or review. That’s what helps more new users discover the show and our great guests, like you read. If you’re listening in Apple Podcasts, you just hit the Library icon, click on Elevate, scroll down to the bottom, leave a rating or review. Yes, you could do that in a second. It doesn’t cost you anything. I hugely appreciate it. Thank you again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Dr. Tasha Eurich
- Insight
- Shatterproof
- Antifragile
- When
- The Miracle Morning
- Elevate with Robert Glazer on Apple Podcasts
About Tasha Eurich
Dr. Tasha Eurich is a renowned organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author, specializing in self-awareness and leadership development. With over 20 years of experience, she has worked directly with more than 20,000 leaders across the globe and spoken to hundreds of thousands more. Dr. Eurich is the principal of The Eurich Group, a consultancy dedicated to helping successful executives transform during high-stakes moments. Her clients include major organizations such as Google, Salesforce, the NBA, Nestlé, and Walmart.
She is recognized as one of the world’s top three most influential coaches and has been ranked as the world’s top communication expert and top organizational culture expert by Global Gurus. Dr. Eurich’s TEDx talk has garnered more than 9 million views, and her work on self-awareness has been featured in prestigious media outlets like TED, NBC, CNN, and Harvard Business Review.
Her books include Bankable Leadership, which debuted at #8 on The New York Times bestseller list, and Insight, named one of the top career books by The Muse and a best business book by Strategy+Business. Her upcoming book, Shatterproof, explores how to navigate disruption and build lasting success.
Dr. Eurich is also a passionate advocate for causes close to her heart, including National Mill Dog Rescue, the Colorado Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the Ehlers Danlos Society. Based in Denver, Colorado, she enjoys traveling, rescuing dogs, and is a self-proclaimed musical theater enthusiast.
