In today's episode, you'll discover why your nonstop overthinking and anxiety is secretly sabotaging your leadership reputation, and you may be completely unaware of this.
Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high performing introverts, including you, social introverts, where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Laura Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, godmother, and strategist.
And by the end of today's episode you'll learn a simple three-step method to defuse that overthinking and reclaim control in high stakes situations.
And listen to this one.
Why relational value, not just your productivity, your results, determines your future as a senior leader.
How to shift from survival mode to thrive, even in the face of personal or professional adversity.
So John Rosenberg from Caracas, Venezuela.
I am so excited to talk to you.
And those of you listening, you may not know this.
I know a lot of you do, but I lived in Venezuela for a long time.
So it's almost like we're cousins, but not quite.
John has written a book about thriving, so I thought you might enjoy getting some tips that, as we're taking over our companies, moving up with executive presence, like how to thrive in the process.
So welcome, John.
Thank you so much, Laura.
I'm so happy to be here.
And I'm grateful to your listeners for taking a little bit of their time to hear about thriving and learn something new.
Oh, yes.
But let me tell you, they are very impatient.
They're super smart, highly attractive.
And They want like lots of value.
They want to know how to do things better.
So I went through your book.
The book is called A Guide to Thriving.
Great title.
And you have, I think, a whole chapter or a subchapter about thinking traps, because almost everybody listening is an overthinker.
We all have our PhDs in overthinking, right?
Tell us about what is a thinking trap?
How can we identify them?
How are they holding us back?
What should we do about these thinking traps?
When you said good looking, I was like, oh, I'm going to fit right in with this crowd.
So thinking traps, or also known I would say the more technical term would be cognitive distortions are kind of trains of thoughts that we experience that can send us down a rabbit hole.
So one of the most common ones is catastrophizing.
And catastrophizing shows up.
Imagine you're driving down the highway and suddenly a little pebble hits your windshield right.
And you see a little crack in your windshield and you think that the entire is going to fall apart because of that.
That's how catastrophizing works.
What's interesting about thinking traps is that if we can take a moment to actually recognize it when it's occurring, then we can deconstruct it and diffuse it.
And that's what I introduce in the book, called the AIR method, which stands for Awareness, Inquiry and Reframing.
And the AIR method.
What it helps you do is to notice a thinking trap like catastrophizing or another one mind reading.
A lot of us believe we're excellent at mind reading.
We're sitting across the table from somebody and you believe that you know exactly what the other person is thinking.
But research suggests that even amongst partners, When partners were trying to guess what their other partner was thinking based on body language or how they were presenting, they guessed right less than 20 of the time, which is no better than chance.
Exactly.
We are terrible at mind reading.
Most of us.
Maybe there's somebody out there who's really good at it, but I haven't met them yet.
I think they're probably listening to a different podcast.
I hear what you're saying about that we're thinking that it's worse than it is.
There's no such thing as a perfect podcast.
Speech.
Exactly.
It doesn't exist.
It doesn't.
So then if we are in this all or nothing thinking mindset, it's never going to be good enough.
Whatever we perform...
It's never by logic, right?
You say okay, if perfection doesn't exist and I'm either perfect or worthless, then I'm always going to be worthless.
And what I did is not going to be good enough.
One of the ideas that I try to challenge deeply in the book is that when we are in this all or nothing thinking, what we surrender is something called agency.
When I talk about agency, the way I define it is the capacity that we have to make intentional choices and the belief behind those choices that they matter and have an impact in the world.
I want to ask you if this is the same thing or just like a cousin or derivation of it, because you know, aristotle came up with a bunch of rhetorical uh tricks that people come up with to persuade, and one of those tricks is a false dichotomy that politicians use all the time.
And by the way, my doctoral dissertation was about Hugo Chavez.
I learned a lot about political rhetoric in that study.
But their message usually boils down to if you don't vote for me, you know the world's going to fall apart like this false dichotomy.
So I think that all or nothing is a variation of that.
And we hear it all the time.
People say, I'm either going to do A or B. as if those are the only options, right?
I believe that one of the reasons why it's so easy for us to buy into it is because it helps us understand.
It helps us boil complexity down to the minimum common denominator.
And because it allows us to do that, then we're like, well, this is a simple decision.
I either vote for A or vote for B. That's it.
What about abstention?
What about starting your own political party?
I don't know.
So then that leads to helplessness and it leads to powerlessness and it leads to a loss of agency.
The general thesis of the book is how to go from survival mode, that state where we feel like we're calling 911 and putting out fires and overthinking and our mind just keep looping and our body's tense and our jaw hurts and our shoulders hurt and our chest and we feel all of this.
How do we diffuse that sense of survival mode?
And it's called survival mode because it's an evolutionary mechanism that helped us survive.
When you were in the savanna and you heard a predator going into that survival mode was really helpful, highly adaptive.
It saved your life, right?
Because it prepared you for fight, flight, or freeze.
But today, most of the threats that we face are not physical.
They're not real threats to our lives, even if they feel like they are to us, right?
Even if the sensations and the emotional and the embodied response feels like a threat, it's really a psychological threat challenge that we're facing right.
A text message from your boss or an email, or suddenly HR puts a half hour meeting in your calendar and you're like what is happening.
Am I getting fired?
And that's a very empowering thought.
My life is not at risk and I can still be happy even if I lose my job.
I want to just switch a little bit to very practical career consequences.
Because what I'm seeing, besides the deeply human development side of things.
I'm a very practical person.
I have realized that when we get caught in such a thinking trap that our brains at least mine just shuts down,
I can't think of anything intelligent, creative, helpful to say or do.
So I know that that is a definite career cost.
What would be other ways?
These thinking traps not only stop us from developing our potential and cause unnecessary suffering.
I mean, there's suffering in life, but you don't need to make it worse, right?
Don't take a bad thing and make it worse.
But what do you see as far as becoming a senior leader now, how these thinking traps would stop that process, right?
It seems to me, like I mean, the senior leader of a company or organization is extremely demanding and you need, like all cylinders firing.
And if these thinking traps are going to Not let that happen.
What's your point of view on that?
I work with a lot of clients.
I coach a lot of clients.
And there's a difference in there's kind of like two big types of value that you can create in a large organization.
Okay.
One of them is the productive value.
And most of us are very familiar with that.
That means, you know, you have a project you completed.
You're creating certain documentation or training or whatever that looks like.
Right.
Something that helps the company make money.
And that's really useful, especially for individual contributors or in people who are early in their careers.
As you're starting to climb in the ladder, productive value starts becoming a little bit less important And relational value starts to take on a really big role.
And relational value is your ability to create meaningful and trusting relationships.
That that, at the same time, create meaningful and trusting relationships.
So it's creating this space where people feel psychologically safe to work together.
What happens when there's relational value and there's psychological safety in an organization is that we tend to fall into thinking traps a lot less.
If the CEO of a company only saw all or nothing when they were making decisions, they would miss the forest for the trees nine out of 10 times.
What I'm suggesting is that, in order to be able to climb and to grow in your career, I think one of the most important skill sets, especially in the age of hybrid work and AI and all of the different things that we're seeing, is being able to deal with complexity.
And in order to deal with complexity, we have to be able to to pause and sidestep the thinking traps.
And that's when the AIR method, this idea of awareness, inquiry and reframe, can be really, really helpful.
And it's a practice.
It's really very simple.
And I call it AIR because...
I often, when I talk to my clients and when I do it myself, I think about it as coming up for air.
You know.
Well, walk us through that.
Awareness inquiry reframing, that's a beautiful short acronym.
So how does that work?
Yeah, so Laura, I just heard you say a few minutes ago that sometimes you overthink a lot, right?
So what does that feel like for you?
I feel trapped.
Mostly I feel...
A loss of agency.
I like to be in control of things.
And I feel like other people and situations are taking away my freedom to act.
And it's going to be terrible.
So you feel terrible.
You feel bad.
You feel powerless.
Mm-hmm.
The A in error is what you just did.
You just acknowledge what is happening to you when you're in survival mode.
You just said, okay, when I'm in survival mode, all of these things are happening.
So if you were able to do it retroactively, Would you be able to do it in the moment and say well, in this moment I'm feeling a loss of control?
I feel bad.
For some people, it's a shallow breath or a tight jaw or a headache or back pain.
You start noticing your body and all of these things, little signals that are telling you hmm, I'm in survival mode.
So that would be awareness.
And that's step one, just acknowledging it and saying in this moment I'm feeling like I'm in survival mode.
Then we move into inquiry.
An inquiry is getting really curious about what's happening here.
So what is driving this current experience of survival mode that I'm having?
Did I receive an email or a Slack message or did I just get off a team skull that got really...
Or is the project running behind on budget and timelines?
So you start asking questions and then you start getting even more curious about it and say well, is my reaction really necessary in this moment?
What really are the implications of this?
Am I really going to lose my job about this?
And usually having open-ended questions can be really helpful.
So in the book, part of what I wanted to do is give folks examples of these questions.
So every chapter ends with a series of questions to help you air questions, to help you kind of identify what is happening.
So that would be step two, getting really curious about it.
And by the way, this whole thing can be done in five minutes.
And then part number three is reframing.
So saying okay, now that I've acknowledged this is happening, now that I've gotten curious and I understand that this is not an all or nothing thing or that I'm not actually reading this person's mind because I have no idea what they're going through, right?
Once you start getting curious, you start kind of finding evidence against all of these ideas and disbeliefs that you're forming in your head.
And the third step is reframing.
Yes, acknowledging this whole situation sent me into survival mode.
And I felt really stressed.
And I can recover from this because I have before.
So what does that look like?
And then that drives us into an agentic situation.
Or I would call it a more proactive agent action because we're not actually reacting.
We're actually processing the experience and doing something about it.
What would be a good question we could ask ourselves to reframe?
Is there a general reframing question that you have?
It depends on what your experience is in the moment.
And I try in the book not to offer one size fits all.
Yes.
Solutions.
Because I believe that we're all different people and you are the expert on your own life.
So only you know what's going to work better for you.
What I have found works really well though, is open-ended questions and questions that offer some compassion.
Think about a question that you'd be asking one of your friends if they came to you with a problem.
Yes, that's a great one.
If a friend comes to you and says, hey, my HR and my boss just put a meeting in my calendar.
I'm getting fired.
This is horrible.
What would you ask them?
Hey, how's your relationship been with your boss?
Right.
Oh, no, we get along great.
And the project is going well.
And you know, okay.
So what evidence do you have to support this idea that this is going to be the end of your career and your life?
You know?
Right, right, right.
Air sounds deceptively simple but, as you can tell Laura, as we get deep into it, There's a lot of nuance and complexity to it.
And I think at the core of it is this idea of self-compassion, of connecting to yourself in a way that you're being as supportive to you as you would be to somebody else who would come asking for your support.
Yeah, we're tough cookies out here.
But okay, John, there's more we have to talk about.
So you're talking to extremely analytical people.
And yet you in your book talk about limits to logic.
What is that about?
How dare you?
Yes.
Well, I think...
About 300 years ago we made this decision that logic and reason were kind of the pinnacle of human evolution.
The alpha, the omega.
Exactly.
And now you're telling me that's not true?
Well, I think true is a big word.
I think logic and reason have given us the modern world.
Laura, you and I wouldn't be talking on screen right now were it not for logic and reason and for science right.
The argument that I make in the book is that We have five senses and we have augmented those five senses with technology.
And yet the perception that we have of reality is limited to what we can actually ingest.
Through either the technology or the five senses we have.
But there might be much, much more out there that we don't know about, right?
Like we know that a dog's sense of smell.
They can smell a drop of blood in a swimming pool of water.
We know that bats use echolocation to fly.
So there's so much more to quote-unquote reality that we don't get access to.
So the power of logic is that it can reduce real complexity into something that we can measure and transform.
The challenge with logic is that it can reduce complexity. it summarizes them into numbers.
It summarizes them into something that doesn't quite capture the complexity.
So this is where other things like emotions and spirituality might come in and have a big impact.
Why is faith such an important thing for humans?
We can't measure faith.
We can't replicate spirituality.
And yet, we find that often meaning in life comes from that.
It comes from moments of awe standing at the top of the Grand Canyon or looking at a starry sky, or connecting with nature, having a newborn in the hospital.
Like all of these things are uniquely human experiences that cannot be reduced to logic.
And that's the point that I'm trying to make.
I totally agree.
It's just hard to swallow sometimes.
But what has made me understand that loss?
I think, yes, we have all these gains that you mentioned.
They're unquestionable, but there are also things that logic cannot address.
And one thing I've noticed... and I'm not the only one to notice, but beauty.
What's a cathedral work of art?
Music that just inspires awe, like the Sistine Chapel, or even Shostakovich, I understand, is the last master to create a musical masterpiece.
Depending who defines what that is.
I would argue the Swifties might think very differently, but hey.
Yeah.
But just to say, yeah, logic doesn't cover all the bases all the time.
It's really this part of our humanity.
Exactly.
And this kind of relates to this last topic I wanted to go into with you because I know a little bit about it, but I want to learn more.
And it's the body's neuroception, like things that we perceive differently outside of those senses, isn't it?
Yeah, so neuroception is a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges.
And by the way, the jury's still out on neuroception and it's a theory.
But like most things in science right, it's only good until somebody comes up with something better, right.
And if not, ask Isaac Newton how he would have felt when Einstein presented the theory of relativity right?
So the interesting thing about neuroception is that It suggests that you know that sense Laura, when you walk into a room.
And there has just been a tense argument in the room.
And you kind of know, right?
What neuroception suggests is that our nervous systems are somehow interconnected in one way or another.
Now, it's not clear what the mechanism is.
Like I said, it's a theory and it needs study and it needs research in order for us to better understand it.
But the concept is nonetheless powerful in telling us that we can sense if we're attuned to our sensations in our body and to how we feel our emotions when we're interacting with somebody.
It can tell us a lot about what that relationship is like.
Mm-hmm.
Before we started this interview, you and I connected over some things that we shared.
And it created a space of, like you said at the beginning.
You know, we're like cousins somehow, right?
And that connection relaxes me as a guest, right?
But that connection...
You know, what New Reception would argue is that the fact that we were able to co-regulate our nervous systems in a way that you and I found kind of a groove in this conversation helps us both communicate better.
Think about how powerful is to have that awareness of how a specific room or an interaction with somebody's feeling
It's been studied as emotional intelligence as well, which is another topic.
I think emotional intelligence refers more to reading emotions and interpreting them, which in itself has a whole ton of complexity around it.
But that's the general idea.
Wow, this is so interesting.
I'm sorry that we don't have more time to go into these issues, but everyone...
I'm sure there's somebody on your Christmas or Hanukkah list that could use the gift of a guide to thriving.
I'm just going to recap some of the points that stood out most to me and then you can close out the conversation.
Of course, the air awareness inquiry reframing as a way to get out of that, that just bad feeling that we get when we're perceiving that bad, something bad is about to happen or we're about to get bad news.
And, you know, Life is full of bad surprises.
So it's not denying reality, but it's finding a way.
I think all of us could share examples.
You know, something like what your wife experienced or is experiencing that these difficulties, these things that we wish would not happen do bring dividends that we cannot get in any other way.
That's a big takeaway the thinking traps, the cognitive distortions and that we think that we know because we're such perfectionists and we know everything.
Well, you really don't.
I thought it was super interesting, the limits of logic.
And that actually if we had we don't have time to go into it, but for everybody listening, you know you're wondering why you didn't get a certain promotion to senior leadership.
It is probably not logical.
It is a relational deficiency.
And that is something that's maybe a bitter pill for some of you to swallow.
But I think that's the reality.
I really appreciated the two types of value.
And this is also related to the limits of logic that productive value based on your results everybody but then the relational value based on your relationships and then finally, the neuroception you're like.
Pay attention if you're having kind of a weird feeling, maybe it's telling you something.
So thank you so much, John.
You can have the last word.
Laura, I'm just deeply grateful to you and to everybody listening.
I hope you find small moments to thrive in your life.
If you like the ADS and you engage with them, you can find me on social media.
I'm on LinkedIn and on Instagram.
Reach out.
I'm eager to hear from you and to connect with anybody who's interested in the conversation that we had today.
Thanks again.
You're welcome.
And yeah, I'll link his LinkedIn in the show notes, everybody.
I'll catch you on the next episode.
Well, that was a very, very good episode.
It was very cool connecting with John.
If you would like free coaching, guess what?
You have an opportunity.
Our episode 500 is coming out December 17th.
If you would like.
To submit a question, simply email me at hello at speakupwithlaura.com.
I need your first name, your role and your company and your question and I will answer it in that episode.
Now my top takeaway from John's conversation was about how we project insecurity When we're overthinking or too concerned about feedback.
Those are traps, right.
And it makes you appear not to be perfectionist, which probably is the root cause, but rather you can appear reactive or indecisive.
So stop doing that.
And if you find yourself stuck constantly overthinking every decision, replaying conversations in your head, assuming the worst, you know that's going to make you feel anxious, powerless and totally drained.
If you would like an objective look at how you're coming across, I suggest you get a copy of my executive presence scorecard, which is an assessment that covers the four pillars of executive presence.
And that will give you a pretty good idea if you want it.
Again, you have to email me at hello at speakupwithlaura.com.
Put SCORE in the subject line and I'll get you that access to the scorecard.
And I hope you have a fantastic and glorious day or evening.
And I will catch you on the next episode.
