Hilary Gridley: belief

Transcript context

…races new ideas and wants to be on the forefront and would never laugh off something that seems like a fringe issue that's I think becoming actually more and more a big part of what's happening today. And so I realized that in that moment I was having that reaction because of the feeling that it gave me about who I am as a person, and I became so worried that this other person had the wrong impression of me. And I wanted to follow up with her after and say, "Let me explain myself. Let me explain why I didn't mean that," or whatever it is. But as I said, I think usually you're fighting a losing battle when you're trying to do that, and it draws attention to the thing that you did poorly. And you don't really want to draw more attention to it. You want to move on, take action, move forward. And so I thought about, well, what am I afraid that she thinks of me? I'm afraid that she thinks that maybe I don't take some of these health issues seriously. I'm afraid she thinks that maybe I'm somebody who laughs off emerging trends. And so I thought about what's something that I could do to demonstrate the opposite of that? And I did some research very, very quickly on what are some emerging public health concerns that people really aren't talking about that would be interesting to track? And I found some interesting research about sports betting, and especially young people in sports betting, and it's becoming this thing that a lot of public health experts are very worried about. And so I very quickly just sent her a note that said, "Wanted to build on this idea you had today. I really liked that idea, by the way. I saw this article, I saw this research about this other emerging thing, sports betting, and I think it'd be really interesting for us to start tracking that because we could maybe draw some correlations between people stress. We have a stress monitor in Whoop. We can track their stress. We could draw interesting correlations between betting behaviors and stress levels." And so that's all I did. It took me five, 10 minutes total. But I think it's a great example of showing this idea of counter-program that narrative, don't fight about the narrative. And so when I teach this to my team, I'm always doing the same thing. They come to me. They seem agitated about something and I say to them, "It seems like this is really bothering you. What's going on in your head? What are you afraid of? What are you worried about?" And often it will emerge, "I'm worried that this other person thinks I'm bad at my job. I'm worried that this person thinks I'm an idiot," whatever it is. And I challenge that. I think this is really important for managers too to challenge this negative thinking when you see it happen and not just validate it and allow them to go down these negative spirals. I challenge it and I say, "First of all, I don't think there's evidence for that. Is there evidence for that? And even if there is, it doesn't really matter. What's something that you could do to show them that it's not true because you know it's not true?" ere's evidence for that. Is there evidence for that? And even if there is, it doesn't really matter. What's something that you could do to show them that it's not true because you know it's not true?" And I think giving people that power to focus on the next step they can take and the action that they can take that helps them feel more secure in their identity in who they are because their action demonstrates that, it just gets them out of that negative thinking and it gets them through that trough of despair that comes after you feel like you took a punch. So the idea here is when you're afraid somebody that matters in your career thinks ill of you, of something that you did, of you're not good at something or you think something that they're not happy about, this is a version of getting punched basically is you just feeling like someone thinks you're not doing a great job. And so the tactic here is how to change their mind almost about you and give you something tangible to do.…

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