How to Know When It's Time to Break Up With Your Job
Episode Stats
Summary
Tessa West is a professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works For You. In this episode, she talks about the relationship between work and relationships and why it's important to have a healthy relationship with your work.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner.
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You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job,
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a quite serious one, in fact. After all, you spend a third of your life working.
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Just like the relationship you have with your significant other,
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there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job.
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You can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way,
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you can end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated.
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And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways.
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Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West,
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professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works For You.
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Tessa interviewed thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes
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and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes.
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Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles
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and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash jobtherapy.
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All right, Tessa West, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on last time to discuss your book, Jerks at Work, and it's how to deal with those
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jerks that you sometimes encounter at the office. You got a new book out called Job Therapy,
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where you dig into our relationship with our job. And I think a lot of people typically don't think
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about having a relationship with their work. You know, a job is just something you do.
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What got you thinking about work in terms of a relationship?
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Yeah, this is a great question. I think, you know, a bunch of different things. But just to kind of
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give you a little bit of background, I've been teaching a close relationships class at New York
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University now for 15 years. And so I've been thinking about how we go from the kind of initial
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attraction stage, so the first date, which is a lot like a first interview, you know, all the way
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through that stage where we get a little bit itchy and we start drifting apart from our partner,
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the ambivalence, those feelings we have that are a little bit complicated, the emotional ups and
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downs, and all the way through the end of a relationship when we decide to break up.
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And what I noticed in the past couple years is that there's just been kind of this shift in how
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we talk about work using these relational concepts. And so, you know, every time I taught, and this was
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last semester, we would talk about, you know, what can go wrong on a first date. And at the same time
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in my consulting and in my research studying the workplace, people were asking me the same types
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of questions about interviews. And when they were trying to process whether they should break up with
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a job that they've been committed to for a long time, they would ask me questions about identity
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loss, like this hole in my heart, how am I going to fill it? And that's the same language we're using
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around marriages. And so I started to kind of see these two worlds I live in converging and these
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concepts starting to overlap in ways that I think most of us had never really thought of before.
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And that's really when I decided to adopt a relational perspective to think about your
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career as just another thing that you have a relationship with, much like a person.
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So a lot of people are unhappy with their current jobs, but they're unhappy for different reasons.
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If you ask five different people why they don't like their job or their career, they might give
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you five different reasons. And you took a deep dive to find out what are the top reasons
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people are unhappy at work. So you did this massive survey. What did you discover?
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You know, I think most of us, if you ask someone why, they don't truly know. And so you kind of
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have to ask more indirectly about how they're feeling. And so what I found was that a big
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chunk of people, especially those who've been working for a really long time, they have a
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crisis of identity. They used to love this thing. And the thing is, you know, tends to treat them
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very well. The career does. But they don't feel as strongly identified with it as they used to.
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And there's a lot of shame and guilt that goes along with that. So that is, you know, the
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Kind of in a similar vein is the person who's drifted apart from their job. And this is the
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person who's pretty nostalgic about what that job used to look like. It could be that the
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whole industry has changed. Maybe it's just this company. But it's a little bit like waking
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up and looking at your spouse in bed and thinking, who are you? I don't recognize this person
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anymore. And for those people, they really have to dig deep to understand kind of what is the
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source of that drifting apart? Is it really just the job or is it also them? And then the
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third is the person who's stretched too thin. And I actually wrote this chapter for everybody.
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I think we all know what it feels like to be juggling multiple roles or tasks or to be
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task switching all the time that we're not getting anything done. And so those individuals tend
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to have taken a few missteps along the way in terms of absorbing roles or taking on what
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I call high visibility roles that they think will get them a raise or promotion, get them on the
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map, so to speak. But they end up just kind of being all over the place or interrupting themselves
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constantly at work. And then the last two chapters are for people who are not getting the love back
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from their careers. So there's the runner-up. We all probably, if you've worked long enough,
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you know what it feels like to get passed up for raises and promotions. And you don't really know
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why. There's a huge kind of gap there between their understanding of what they're doing wrong
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and what leaders think they should be doing instead. And then the underappreciated star,
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the person who gets a lot of, you know, nice Slack messages or emails, but the real rewards
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aren't coming. And they're often kind of dangled in front of them in some sort of like hypothetical
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future. You know, if you stick here long enough, you'll get that president job in a year and then
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eventually the C-suite. And, you know, once we have enough money, you'll get that bonus. And so they
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really have to figure out if they can get compensated better elsewhere and how much
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organizations actually even really care about hiring stars. So those last two chapters are
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really about trying to get the love from that relationship with your career back that you are
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feeling towards it. Okay. So these are the top five. We got the crisis of identity, the drifted apart,
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the stretch too thin, the runner-up, the underappreciated star. We're going to dig into each of these here in
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the conversation. But you also found before we talk about these five different types of
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dissatisfaction profiles, you also talked about there might be a lot of job dissatisfaction that
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just comes up from like daily stressors that we tend to overlook with a job. It's not even that
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you don't identify with your job anymore or you feel like you're stretched too thin. It's just the
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other stuff that we overlook when it comes to having a job that might be causing us dissatisfaction.
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What sorts of stressors are those? Yeah, I think, you know, most of us experience a lot of low-level
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stress at work, but we don't actually see how it kind of builds up and affects our happiness at work
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or our engagement or these kind of like bigger picture things. And I think what I did for this
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chapter was I ran a simple study where I asked people in the morning, what do you think is going
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to stress you out today? You know, what your biggest stressor is going to be? And then I asked
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them again to do it in the evening. What actually stressed you out? And there's not a ton of overlap.
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And I think it's because anticipated stressors tend to be big things. They tend to be things like
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a presentation I have to give, a meeting I'm really nervous about. What people reported are
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what I would call like certainty-based stressors, things that they can anticipate and then plan for.
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And because you can plan for those things, you actually don't end up experiencing that much
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stress. You put some steps in place to make sure you can handle the thing. You know, we call this a
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challenge response in health psychology. But what ends up actually stressing people out are pretty
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small things. And many of them, we tell ourselves we can't anticipate, but we actually can if we're
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a little bit more strategic. A commute that ran too long. Your parking space has been taken up.
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Your boss putting a last minute deadline on your calendar. Someone interrupting you at work.
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Those things that we don't really see coming in the morning, but they end up being additive and
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really stressing us out. But kind of ironically, what I found is that even for those things,
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if you ask someone if they've experienced it before, they'll tell you,
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oh yeah, I experience this all the time. They just don't encode it as a stressful thing.
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And so they don't think about it again and they don't plan for it. But most of the time,
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we've had that last minute meeting put on our calendar. We've had that commute go long. We've
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had our parking space stolen and so forth. So if we just kind of keep track of these things,
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we can actually do a much better job of mitigating their effects on us.
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And what that can do, I think a lot of people, my experience, those were daily stressors,
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mundane stressors. They think, well, I just hate my career. I hate my job. Well,
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maybe your career and job's fine. You just got to take care of those things like the job or career
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you have right now. It'll be great. Yeah. I think we tend to catastrophize a little bit when we've
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had an accumulation of small stressors. It's a little like anyone who's been a parent and they
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have a kid who misses a nap and they just lose it completely and cry over everything. I think
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there's an adult version of that, which is an accumulation of small daily stressors.
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They affect our health. They affect our sleep. And that in turn affects our ability to cognitively
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function, to regulate our emotions at work, to handle difficulties that come flying at us. And
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I think that we do dramatically underestimate the effects of those low-level things. And then we
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catastrophize and tell ourselves, oh my gosh, this job just isn't a good fit for me. I feel really
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miserable right now. But because we haven't identified the source, we attribute it to something big and
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existential. And that's where I think your first step is just to keep track of those low-level
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things to try to correct for those before you get into the deep kind of psychological issues you might
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be experiencing. Okay. So let's dig into those deep psychological issues. Let's say you took care
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of all those stressors and you're still not feeling happy with your job. Your book is designed to help
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you figure out why you might be unhappy with your job or career. And that first one you said is the
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crisis of identity. And this is someone who starts a job or career. It's a good fit initially. They
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enjoy at the beginning. They actually get really good at their career job. But then they start having
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second thoughts. So what are some signs that the crisis of identity is the reason you're unhappy with
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your job? So I think there's two things that you need to do. You know, I give you kind of this
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checklist of, is your career identity a central part of who you are? And a lot of people who are
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having a crisis of identity still say yes to that question. Things like, when I think about, for me,
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when I think about being a professor, that's really important to how I see myself. It's central to my
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self-esteem. So you want to measure that and you want to measure it over time. Because I think we
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have days in which we feel highly identified with our work and days when we feel less identified.
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You want to measure how stable that so-called identity centrality is over time. But the second core
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piece is what we call identity satisfaction. And so you can be really identified with your career.
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It can be a core piece of who you see yourself as a person and hate it at the same time. Hate the fact
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that your self-esteem is yoked to this thing, that this thing doesn't bring you happiness.
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And I think a lot of people having a crisis of identity kind of fall into that dangerous quadrant
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of high centrality and low satisfaction. We see this a lot in healthcare, with burnout and things like
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that. And that can create a lot of ambivalence in people, where you sort of love and hate your
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job at the same exact time. And that, to me, is the big warning sign. Not that you hate your job
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consistently, but that you feel like it's a core piece of you and you're not happy with it. And you
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kind of love and hate it on and off, often within the same day. In relationship science, this kind of
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heightened sense of ambivalence tends to be what predicts when people break up. Not so much just
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consistently being negative, but feeling really kind of angsty inside when you think about your
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career. Yeah. Your crisis of identity, that high centrality, low satisfaction. It's like your job's
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your frenemy, right? Like you love it and hate it. We've had podcast guests talking about that's like
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the worst type of relationship you want to have with somebody. Yeah. It is the biggest predictor of
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getting into an on-again, off-again relationship. If you don't actually sort of resolve that identity
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centrality and you start kind of exploring new identities before you leave, that's really key.
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Otherwise, it's just like breaking up with your ex and getting back together because you have nothing
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to kind of fill the void. The same thing can happen at work. Give us some more concrete examples of what
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it would look like if you had high career identity centrality. You think of yourself as ex-profession,
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but low satisfaction. And what contributes to that low satisfaction?
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It's a lot of intermittent reinforcement at work, I think, that really does that. That puts you in
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that unique quadrant. It is your boss reinforcing you in a way that is difficult to predict. You don't
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know when you're going to get a pat on the back or told you're great. You don't know when you're going
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to get ignored or told you're doing poorly. It's a very unpredictable reinforcement schedule. And we know
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from behavioral science that that's the best way to keep people yoked to something that they don't
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actually love. And so if you are getting reinforced, but if you keep track of that reinforcement,
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and by reinforcement, I just mean anything from a bonus or raise, those are big forms of reinforcement
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to small ones, like people recognizing your contributions at work. If you can't predict
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when you're going to be positively reinforced for what you're doing at work, then you're going to get
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really strongly pulled into that pattern where you have a hard time letting go. In fact,
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reinforcement, it works on monkeys, it works on rats, it works on humans and relationships. And I think
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it actually makes you more identified with something than even just getting positively
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reinforced consistently does. There's something about the uncertainty, the lack of predictability
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that really keeps people tethered to these things that they don't love. And I think that's where it
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gets a little bit scary. Okay. So if your identity centrality is high and your identity
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satisfaction is low, that might be an instance where your career is fine. Your chosen career is great.
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You just need to find maybe another place to do that career.
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Yes. I think the biggest mistake people make is they act on that identity satisfaction and think
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they should just completely pivot to something new. And then they realize a little bit into that
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journey that, oh, wait, I actually kind of missed my old thing. Well, you need to measure your
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centrality around that old career before you make that pivot. So if you have that low satisfaction,
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before you pivot, you want to make sure that that identity centrality is consistently low for a period
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of time. And so you're absolutely right. If you find high centrality, identity centrality consistently
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for a while, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple of months or whatever, then you probably are just
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more in a place where you want to stick with your career, but need to find it elsewhere.
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Okay. What happens if you have low identity centrality with your career? Let's say you're a professor
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and at the beginning of your career, you think, or you feel like this is what I was meant to do.
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I enjoy doing this. I enjoy being a professor. But then 10 years later, you're just not feeling
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it anymore. It doesn't seem like that's what you're supposed to be doing. How do you go about
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trying to figure out what your next career is? Like, how do you go about making that big change from
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professor to something else? Yeah. I think the first step you want to do, and this scares people,
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but I think before you quit your job, you know, is you actually need to start dating new identities.
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And I probably take this metaphor too far, but you need to actually kind of try on new identities,
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develop a clear sense of what your future identity is going to look like before you make any moves.
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And, you know, the only real way to do that, it isn't by reading company websites or taking extra
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courses. It's by networking and having, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations with people
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in new careers where you can do things like tell the difference between two things that sound
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similar, but are actually super different or learn the hidden curriculum around what it really takes
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to succeed or learn jargon, which I know gets a bad reputation, but we use it anyway. So really kind
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of exploring these new careers to develop just a clear sense of what your future identity looks like
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or could potentially be before you ever take that next step. And I think too many of us are
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attempted to quit, take some time off, take some extra courses, apply for jobs before we do that
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whole developing the new identity thing. We think we can't develop an identity around a career we
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haven't jumped into or haven't tried yet, but I actually don't think that's true at all. I think
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you can actually start to understand what that identity would look like should you be in it by
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doing this networking. And I think that's a really important kind of in-between step people need
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to do. Yeah. So before you quit, talk to a bunch of people who were in that career you're thinking
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about. I think another thing you could do too is like do some moonlighting. Maybe you want to be
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a writer. Well, try moonlighting as a writer while you still have your job or you're like, oh, I hate
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my corporate job. I want to become a pool cleaning guy. Like start cleaning pools and see what it's
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like on, you know, do it on the weekends, for example. Yeah. You have to try it out. I think,
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you know, I, I meet all kinds of people who think a career would be a good fit for them because they
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think really big picture in terms of it. You know, someone wants to be a nurse who I talk to
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because she cares about helping people and she really wanted to just do that. But, you know,
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and she got trained as a nurse during COVID. So very, very little hands-on training, but then she
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kind of realized she hated the sight of blood and cleaning up poop, which turns out to be like 80%
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of your job as a nurse. And those just kind of like, what is the day in the life actually look like
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is something that you can't know unless you actually kind of try the job on a little bit
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and try it. And I think the moonlighting piece is really important. I think people are afraid to do
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that or they feel like they don't have the time or the mental resources to do it, but you're not
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going to know how that new job feels, whether it fits you, unless you actually sample it a little
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bit first. You know, people can have this problem even at the start of their careers. I went to law
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school. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer since I was in high school because my idea of being a lawyer
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was like watching Matlock and law and order. And then I went to law school and I had to do my
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internship and I did my first internship at a big firm. I hated it. I absolutely, like, it just did
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not suit my personality. So yeah, that can happen at the beginning. So I think I would have been
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better served before going to law school. Like actually, I didn't know any attorneys too. I just
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thought, you know, I had no clue what it meant to be a lawyer. I think it would have been better
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served to maybe talk to a bunch of lawyers, maybe like in high school or college, worked there for
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the summer to see what it was like. That would have been helpful. I think, yeah, I would add
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another piece of advice, which is like when you're doing this, the temptation is to find a bunch of
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people who kind of know each other and network that way. So, you know, you find a lawyer and then
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you ask that lawyer for another lawyer you can talk to. And we call that snowball sampling. It's a
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great way to network. But when you do that, you get a lot of overlapping information about a career
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because those people have things in common with each other that might not actually reflect what it's
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going to look like for you. So you want to actually network with people who don't know each
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other, who don't have completely shared histories or even work in the same organization because you
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want to look for that kind of, you know, signal in the noise across all these diverse people to
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understand what the career could really look like. I think one big misstep people do is they talk to
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10 people, all of whom have the same boss or work for the same organization. And then they overgeneralize
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those 10 people's experiences to what that career would look like for them. And then there's just
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nothing in common. And I think you really have to really broaden your network in that early,
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early stage. Talk to, you know, a litigator for you, but also maybe someone who works for the county,
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all kinds of law, you know, just to get a little bit of sense of the heterogeneity of the career.
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And then when you're talking to people, you have this great question to ask to really get
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information you otherwise wouldn't get to really figure out what it's like to have this career.
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And the question is, before I started this job, nobody told me that and then have the person
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finish. Cause then you might learn some things that you, you probably didn't know and wouldn't
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have even known to ask. Yeah, I think I love this question. It's based on this NPR, really funny
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thing they did of, I must've missed that day where people talk about late knowledge that they
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accumulated. And I gave this survey to a bunch of people and I got like really wild answers,
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you know, all kinds of things from like weird hidden norms. Like I didn't know that I had to
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bring chocolate once a week to the boss too. I didn't realize that as part of my job running,
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you know, this art gallery, I had to lift heavy boxes. And most of the things people reported were
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extra roles and responsibilities that they were assumed to do, that it was normative to do,
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but they were not hired to do. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we actually drift apart
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from our job or have an identity crisis is because of this sort of like lack of role clarity being
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asked to do random stuff that has nothing to do the job. So you want to, you want to get a sense of
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what, what weird randomness you might encounter should you take on this career. And I think the
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answers are, will surprise you. And people are always a little bit surprised when they get asked that
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question, but they come up with like pretty interesting and creative answers. So that was kind of one of the
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more fun things I did for this book. Okay. So with crisis of identity, you want to look at your
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identity centrality, identity satisfaction. So if you are still, you still have a high identity
00:21:24.320
centrality with your career, but low satisfaction, maybe you don't jump careers completely. You just
00:21:29.540
find another place where you can get that satisfaction again. Then if your identity centrality is low,
00:21:35.220
so maybe you started your career thinking yourself as a lawyer, professor, teacher, et cetera,
00:21:39.520
you're not feeling that anymore. That's when you might think about jumping ships to different
00:21:44.080
career. But before you do that, network, ask around, figure out what it's like with these new
00:21:49.000
careers, you're dating other careers and maybe even moonlight. We're going to take a quick break
00:21:53.920
for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let's talk about that second reason
00:22:03.400
you've found that people are dissatisfied with the work and that's when they've drifted apart from their
00:22:09.120
job. What does that look like? And how do you know that's your dissatisfaction profile?
00:22:15.320
So the drifted apart person tends to think about what their career used to look like. So their
00:22:20.540
happiness is anchored on the past and they'll use very nostalgic language. I really loved it when,
00:22:26.040
you know, we all worked under the same roof and now we're hybrid. They will often, you know,
00:22:31.160
I gave people a checklist of a bunch of items. They'll often check off a whole bunch of things that have
00:22:35.220
changed at work. The most common are the people you work with. So relationships, who your boss is,
00:22:40.440
who's on your team, whether that best friend from work is still there. And they recognize that a whole
00:22:45.700
bunch of little things have changed, but they often have a very difficult time seeing how all of these
00:22:50.240
things have led to them just feeling ennui at work, feeling bored and, you know, not interested and no
00:22:57.540
longer motivated. I think what's fascinating is a lot of us tend to think that some big picture change,
00:23:03.580
like a restructure or a round of layoffs is what led to these things. But even the leaders I surveyed
00:23:09.720
said that it's very hard to draw those associations. So we're left with a million kind of death by a
00:23:14.840
thousand paper cuts at work, a million little things that have changed, but no sense of how
00:23:18.800
they all kind of work together to lead us to feel this way. And then coupled with that is a bit of
00:23:24.340
an underestimation of how much we've changed at work, how much, you know, maybe our preferences have
00:23:29.520
also changed that have contributed to this feeling. So we know we're unhappy. We think we still like
00:23:34.320
this career, but we're not quite sure why. And that's, that's where a lot of the soul searching
00:23:39.060
goes. So what are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether you need to jump
00:23:44.040
ship to a different career? Maybe you just got to change things with your current career.
00:23:49.080
I think for the drifted apart, the main mystery here is if one type of change will happen in the
00:23:56.460
workplace, is it going to trickle down to affect a type of change that they really don't enjoy and
00:24:02.720
whether that's industry wide or not. And I think for them, is this a new career issue or is it just
00:24:09.240
my job really comes down to has the whole industry changed? And a lot of people who feel drifted apart
00:24:15.360
at work or nostalgic for their old job really think it's just their workplace. They think very locally
00:24:20.760
about the changes, but often once they start networking and exploring things, they actually realize
00:24:25.960
there's been, you know, kind of this just massive evolution of the whole entire industry and often
00:24:33.660
in ways that they don't totally anticipate. So, you know, one person I talked to was a school
00:24:38.340
psychologist and that used to involve a lot of therapy and now it's just testing. And why has that
00:24:43.340
happened? Well, there's been some state regulations around what a school psychologist can and can't do
00:24:48.540
that has just fundamentally altered the nature of that career. It doesn't matter what school district
00:24:53.780
you're in. You're just going to be doing testing all day long. People who feel it and just kind of a
00:24:58.440
very much in the moment way have had AI introduced into the workplace or things like new software
00:25:03.660
programs that they have to use. And so they don't actually understand how widespread these changes
00:25:09.060
are. And that's really what they have to first decide is, you know, are there so many changes to
00:25:13.660
this whole industry that I no longer recognize it and I need something completely different? Or is it just
00:25:18.920
my place has gotten weird and different and I could actually kind of find what I used to have
00:25:23.240
somewhere else? Gotcha. Yeah, I think that's interesting. The idea of industry-wide changes
00:25:28.200
causing you to drift apart. You've been seeing a lot of this going back to education. A lot of teachers
00:25:33.840
are quitting teaching and you ask them why and they just say, well, it's just the profession of teaching,
00:25:39.960
particularly in public schools, has changed dramatically. We have to do different things. Like,
00:25:44.280
this is not the thing I signed up for when I became a teacher. Yeah, there's a huge emphasis
00:25:48.480
on state testing performance. And so now they all have to just spend so much time doing test prep,
00:25:54.240
very little flexibility in curriculum. There's a lot of kind of like top-down direction giving of
00:25:59.680
what you can and can't teach. So teachers who really value creativity feel stifled in the classroom.
00:26:05.720
So they're looking for jobs in which they can like kind of do that piece of it elsewhere. But I think for
00:26:11.420
them, the struggle is often, well, where can I actually do that? You know, who does value that
00:26:16.800
piece of me, that kind of creative curriculum building piece? And then how kind of fungible
00:26:21.660
is that skill into a new career? And how can then I talk that new career into believing me that this
00:26:27.600
skill has utility in that job? And so learning kind of how to transfer skills is super important for
00:26:33.340
people like that, for people like those teachers. Okay. So if you feel like you drifted apart,
00:26:37.280
you need to figure out whether this is just happening at your particular job or if this is
00:26:42.280
a larger thing. And if it's a larger thing, that may suggest you need to jump ship to a different
00:26:48.240
career, pivot. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you also want to document your own changes. I talk about
00:26:55.140
in the book about framing this, not in terms of what you used to love and now hate, but in terms of
00:27:00.260
your preferences for specific types of work to kind of pull the emotions out of it a little bit.
00:27:05.600
I used to prefer X and now I prefer Y. So that when you network, you can kind of anchor those
00:27:11.000
conversations around whether that type of task you're interested in, that preference is reflected
00:27:16.100
in what people are doing in that other job. Gotcha. All right. So the third reason people
00:27:20.960
might feel unhappy about their work is the stretched too thin. And you said earlier, you think a lot of
00:27:27.040
people, even if they're pretty happy with their career job, a lot of people might be experiencing this.
00:27:32.360
So what are some signs that you are the stretched too thin dissatisfaction profile?
00:27:39.640
One of the main things is you have a really hard time rank ordering the importance of your roles
00:27:45.040
at work. So, you know, I kind of talked a little bit about like, there's two issues. There's the
00:27:48.800
role stuff, you know, what you're doing, what your actual job is, and then how you work.
00:27:53.120
The role thing, I think is a real problem. I think we have our assigned roles, the roles that
00:27:57.040
we're paid to do. And then we have, most of us spend like eight to 10 hours a week on roles
00:28:01.820
that we weren't assigned to do, many of which we're not even paid to do. And you need to ask
00:28:07.380
yourself the question, you know, write out all your roles at work, rank order them in terms of
00:28:11.160
most to least important and importance in terms of what you care about, but also importance in terms
00:28:15.900
of what matters for promotion and raises and so forth. And if you have a hard time with that rank
00:28:20.740
ordering list, you probably actually have no idea what roles you should be focusing on.
00:28:24.660
I think, you know, a lot of us work in places where it's normative to take on the role of
00:28:30.440
somebody else when they're out or if they've been laid off, there's a lot of role absorption going
00:28:34.860
on. But one thing that people also do is they volunteer for roles that they think will make
00:28:39.820
them visible. Things like running an employee resource group or a conference committee, these
00:28:45.320
kind of community building roles that are helpful, but your performance on those roles are rarely
00:28:50.200
discussed by leaders during promotion decisions. And so you feel good and you get a lot of
00:28:54.220
pats on the back and everyone loves you for taking these things on, but they don't actually
00:28:58.480
matter as much as you think you do. So I think you really want to sort of critically evaluate
00:29:03.080
your own roles. And then the second piece is how you actually work. Are you switching tasks
00:29:08.520
so often you're getting nothing done? And I think most of us are used to task switching.
00:29:13.920
Most of us are also not very good at preventing ourselves from interrupting ourselves. And so most
00:29:19.460
of those interruptions are so-called self-interruptions. And so kind of figuring out what your
00:29:23.720
pattern is there of like how you can actually just be more productive at work by interrupting
00:29:28.320
yourself or having others interrupt you more strategically so that when you jump back into
00:29:32.680
something, you can actually kind of, you know, have a much more systematic workflow. I talked
00:29:38.440
to neuroscientists for this chapter because a lot of why we feel stretched too thin actually comes down
00:29:43.240
to the memories we form at work and our ability to kind of start where we left off has to do with
00:29:49.800
how good we were at encoding what we did in the first place. And when we interrupt ourselves a lot,
00:29:54.900
we don't encode those memories of what we were working on. And that makes it very hard for us to
00:29:59.040
pick up. So I think there's some little things you can do, some strategic things you can do to kind
00:30:03.860
of reduce that mental load of task switching. So if this is your dissatisfaction profile, there's
00:30:08.900
actually a lot of things you can do with your current job to maybe remedy. You can talk to your
00:30:12.560
boss about the distractions or the multiple roles, and maybe you can reduce some of that. But it might
00:30:18.600
reach a point where it's just expected that you do these multiple roles and you realize you're not
00:30:24.020
going to be able to do the work that you want to do, you know, well, that might nudge you to look for
00:30:29.980
another job. Yeah, I think one thing that happens a lot is organizations talk out of both sides of their
00:30:35.140
mouth. They say that they're really good at promoting people internally into leadership
00:30:39.100
positions. But at the same time, they ask everyone to do all the things at once. And they're not very
00:30:44.820
strategic about how they get you to prioritize roles. And then they kind of like shift the narrative
00:30:49.880
on you like, well, the reason why you weren't promoted is because you weren't good at prioritizing
00:30:54.520
your work. What they don't realize is that, you know, maybe the middle manager is asking,
00:30:58.720
you know, 15 people to do all of these different jobs at once. And so if your own leader
00:31:04.780
or manager can't help you with that, you know, task of just prioritizing your roles,
00:31:10.620
most important to least important, and they keep telling you that there's a tie between one and two
00:31:15.220
and five and six, then that's probably a red flag that they don't even know, you know, what this
00:31:19.680
should look like. And they're not even sure about people who've been successfully promoted and how
00:31:24.440
they prioritize their own roles. So, you know, you can, you can make that list and go out into the
00:31:28.560
world and, you know, talk to hiring managers with your role prioritization. And during interviews,
00:31:33.180
ask them point blank, how are you going to help me stick to kind of this rank ordering of roles
00:31:38.700
when people start nudging me to do additional work? Like what process do you have in place to
00:31:43.660
sort of protect me, to insulate me from, you know, that role creepage that a lot of us are feeling at
00:31:49.920
work? And I think that's a fair question to ask. And as you were talking, it reminded me,
00:31:54.520
it might be useful too, if you're feeling stretched too thin to do a broader view of the,
00:31:59.860
your career landscape. Cause you might find, okay, I'm feeling stretched too thin at this
00:32:04.060
particular company or organization. Maybe if I just go somewhere else and keep the same career,
00:32:07.880
you might find the same problem because industry wide, they're asking these people who have this
00:32:13.000
career to do multiple roles, no matter where you go. So you might have to do some more investigation,
00:32:17.360
like talk to your friend who lives in Nebraska or, you know, different States. Are you seeing the
00:32:22.940
same sort of thing in your career? Like if you're a teacher, are they having you do this,
00:32:26.500
this, this, this? And if it's like, yes, it's like, well, maybe this is all over the place.
00:32:30.180
Maybe you have to go to a different career. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know,
00:32:34.480
some people can handle that sort of million things at once. Some people are really good
00:32:38.740
at boundaries. Others are yes people and they're people pleasers. And, you know, if you are a people
00:32:43.820
pleaser and you have a hard time saying no, or you care a lot about your team liking you,
00:32:48.620
then you know, your Achilles heel at work is going to be taking on the extra work of people,
00:32:52.560
taking on those extra roles. And, you know, another kind of interesting thing I learned
00:32:56.880
when writing this book is that a lot of times when we are taking on extra work of people,
00:33:01.260
it's not because there's a free rider problem in our teams where people are just sort of offloading.
00:33:06.300
Often this happens in well-structured teams that don't have a free rider problem where people are
00:33:11.280
actually getting credit for their work. What they don't realize is when you get credit for doing
00:33:15.920
something someone else has paid to do, even if people verbally recognize it, it's very hard to
00:33:21.920
kind of integrate that information into a promotion decision. Rarely will a boss say,
00:33:27.320
yeah, you know, this person was amazing. They took on the work of everybody else on the team.
00:33:32.660
I think we should promote them because it makes them look like a bad boss. It makes them look
00:33:36.040
disorganized. And so doing work that someone else has technically paid for, even if you get credit
00:33:41.680
for it in the moment, rarely translates to an actual promotion opportunity. And I think people
00:33:46.720
don't understand that disconnect that is pretty common. Okay. So the next reason, the fourth reason
00:33:51.880
that people might be unhappy with their job is they feel like they can't get ahead in their career
00:33:56.200
because they never get promoted or get a raise. They're just overlooked all the time. I mean,
00:34:01.160
you call this the runner up. Why are some people consistently runner ups in their career?
00:34:06.000
There's a couple of sort of really difficult answers to that question. The first one is that they
00:34:11.460
have less status than they think they do. And this is a hard pill to swallow. This idea that,
00:34:17.080
you know, maybe people don't respect you, admire you. They don't care about your contributions
00:34:21.660
as much as they need to in order for you to get promoted. And, you know, I asked people,
00:34:28.160
were you given an explicit reason why you weren't promoted? And most weren't, but they had some kind
00:34:32.700
of sense that low status might be a play. I asked people who make promotion decisions why people
00:34:38.640
weren't get promoted. They kind of said the same thing. No one was really told they don't have
00:34:42.340
status, but that's kind of the reason that it's implied, but never actually said. And then among
00:34:48.360
those who successfully get promoted, they're like, oh yeah, absolutely. It's because I was told that I
00:34:52.980
have status. So the only people who are actually sure that status matters are those who are successfully
00:34:58.740
promoted because it's easy to tell someone when they have status. It's very hard to tell them when
00:35:02.400
they don't. And, you know, I talk a lot about in my book of like how to read status, which is this
00:35:07.900
kind of complex topic around, you know, things like if you write an email to the boss, how quickly
00:35:12.680
does the boss reply versus if someone else does, is it quicker or slower? Status is often conveyed
00:35:19.340
very indirectly through these subtle ways. You know, when you contribute to a meeting, does your
00:35:24.080
contribution stick? Do people build on it or do they always switch topics? And this kind of like soft
00:35:29.420
nebulous construct is one of the main reasons why people keep going up for promotions and not
00:35:34.800
succeeding because they don't have as much status as they think they have. And they don't, they're
00:35:39.060
never told that and they have a really hard time correcting for that. So I think, you know, that's
00:35:43.940
kind of one of the trickier things that you have to learn about yourself. One of the more kind of
00:35:48.420
threatening, stressful ones. Some of the kind of more obvious ones are things like you've missed a
00:35:53.260
couple key roles along the way. So you got maybe a battlefield promotion. You were hired into a
00:35:58.900
position of leadership that you really didn't have the experience for, but you missed one or
00:36:02.940
two things in the past. And whoever's making decisions now really cares about those one or
00:36:08.300
two things. And they can even feel a little bit arbitrary, but they're going to die on this
00:36:11.860
hill of we're not promoting someone without those things. I think those are, you know, a couple
00:36:16.420
things. And then there's the like scary, not within your own hands problem. Like my boss actually
00:36:22.540
doesn't have enough status to promote me. My boss loves me, but when that person walks into
00:36:27.340
the room, no one listens to who they think should get promoted because they're not a big enough deal.
00:36:32.640
They don't have, you know, enough tenure at this company. So those are the three main categories
00:36:37.060
of reasons I found that people really struggle. Okay. So you have to become more status savvy
00:36:41.040
if this is your problem. And you talk about, again, like status, you said it's very subtle.
00:36:45.440
You have to pay attention to how people respond to you, how quickly they respond to you to emails,
00:36:49.200
et cetera. So you don't want to ask, Hey, do I have status? Do you guys think I have high
00:36:52.980
status? Cause everyone's like, what the heck? You weirdo. You don't ask that question.
00:36:55.580
Yeah. It's a totally weird question. But you can ask a question, you know, to your boss or maybe
00:37:01.140
your coworkers, like, you know, do you think my contributions have an impact? And if the answer
00:37:07.580
is no, hopefully they'll give you that honest feedback. You're even smaller than that. Say you
00:37:13.840
bring three ideas to a meeting and none of the ideas stick and they don't end up being any of the
00:37:18.520
ideas written on the whiteboard. You can talk to your boss or your team members and say,
00:37:22.740
can you maybe give me some insight into like why, why you think those ideas weren't the ones we went
00:37:28.560
with or in what ways, you know, it was presenting these ideas, maybe not ideal. So the smaller,
00:37:35.680
the more specific and behavioral you can get in the kind of the more immediate after the thing,
00:37:39.960
the better. And I think a lot of people in client facing jobs have this problem where they don't know
00:37:44.800
why clients don't prefer them. They prefer someone else over them. And they walk out of that client
00:37:50.160
meeting and think, I thought that went really well. And then they find out, okay, well, you know,
00:37:54.580
we got the job, but the client doesn't ever want to talk to you again. And they don't, no one really
00:37:58.580
explains to them why that was the case. And it could be something like they interrupted too often,
00:38:03.240
or they talked for too long, or they were too loud. It could be little things like that,
00:38:07.040
that accumulate over time. If you don't get corrected, you just end up kind of hitting your
00:38:12.040
head against a wall constantly because you can't move forward.
00:38:14.300
So what are some solutions? You mentioned just asking for feedback, figuring out like what you
00:38:19.100
need to do to advance in your job. Like, but I mean, let's say you do those things. How do you
00:38:26.460
I think that you need to do a lot of work ahead of time to figure out whose voices get heard and why,
00:38:32.080
you know, kind of one of the more fascinating findings from my work on status is that it's not
00:38:37.060
always the person who makes the most persuasive argument. It's the person who organizes the team ahead of
00:38:42.540
time and says things like, let's all go around the room and share one idea. And so people have some
00:38:48.140
instincts of what gives them status. And those instincts are talk a lot, come with the most
00:38:53.520
persuasive arguments, and interrupt people. Those are dominance things. Those aren't actual prestige
00:38:59.840
things. And so you kind of need to learn how to figure out where your expertise lies, stay in your
00:39:05.860
lane with that expertise, and minimize the amount of jockeying you do for status in groups.
00:39:11.200
Nothing loses status quicker than trying to take it from another person in the actual meeting,
00:39:17.060
you know, by verbally dominating that person. That is a losing strategy that I see people try
00:39:21.820
over and over again. It's a very heavy handed strategy. You got to kind of do your work behind
00:39:26.180
the scenes. And that includes kind of networking with other high status people who aren't in your
00:39:30.980
role. So you know who you need to actually impress, you know, who actually matters in this meeting.
00:39:36.040
And so subtle things, subtle leadership behaviors that actually show you care more about the team
00:39:41.280
than the individual is a huge way to gain status. I did a lot of work, a lot of research looking at
00:39:46.900
what's called a status jolt in the workplace. So this happens when all of a sudden, you know, we have
00:39:51.360
our team, we know who has status, we know who doesn't, and then something happens to the organization
00:39:55.760
to kind of throw a wrench in it, a merger, or we're now all on Zoom, or whatever the thing is.
00:40:01.060
The people who try to cling to their old status with selfish behavior by trying to outperform others,
00:40:07.140
not sharing information, not being helpful, they lose their status the quickest. And so clinging to
00:40:12.940
old status is also a way you can lose status in a new team. You need to actually be pretty helpful
00:40:18.820
and you know, not so Machiavellian if you want to actually gain status after a jolt like that. So
00:40:25.060
focus more kind of on helping behavior and on transparency around process and around kind of
00:40:30.840
soft leadership. Those are the best ways to actually gain status at work, not by being heavy
00:40:34.940
handed and loud and interrupting people or even being the most persuasive in the room.
00:40:38.860
Let's say you do all this stuff. You try to do a better job managing your status at your current job,
00:40:43.760
but you do it and nothing's coming from you're still getting overlooked. So I think it can happen
00:40:48.260
because you're kind of people kind of put you in a box. It's like, well, this is Bill. Bill's just this
00:40:54.180
way. We know Bill. We know Bill, but like, you know, even though Bill's been doing some great
00:40:57.700
stuff, some great moves to make contributions, it's like, well, it's Bill. He's just not going
00:41:01.840
to get a promotion. Like when do you realize like I've reached my limit here? Like people aren't
00:41:06.340
going to give me a promotion. Like how do you decide I got to jump ship? I love that question.
00:41:10.500
It's like, at what point is your status, your old status so stuck to you that impression formation
00:41:16.980
changes impossible, right? Like everyone's just decided who you are. It's a bit of like manifest destiny
00:41:22.880
problem. Like you cannot override that impression that people have of you. It's too difficult.
00:41:27.360
I do think if you're stuck in that position and it doesn't matter what you do, then a learned
00:41:32.320
helplessness is going to set in and you're going to figure out it doesn't matter if I actually improve
00:41:36.820
here. Nobody cares because they are anchoring their judgments on my past behavior. I really do think
00:41:42.200
that's when you have to consider leaving. You know, if you are getting pretty hard evidence that,
00:41:47.560
you know, no matter what you do here, you can never correct for your mistakes of the past.
00:41:53.160
It's a little like I cheated on my husband five times. He's never going to believe me,
00:41:57.160
you know, ever again. Then I think you are kind of stuck. And we know from the impression
00:42:01.880
formation literature that it's really hard to override those impressions once we have them of
00:42:05.620
someone. And so I don't want to be Pollyannish about this and say, you can all fix your status.
00:42:10.280
You can override those impressions, especially if you've been in a place for a while and it becomes
00:42:14.480
kind of impossible. Then you might need to actually make a career change. And when you do that,
00:42:18.900
you might have to take a step down before you can take a step up again. You might have to eat a little
00:42:22.760
slice of humble pie to kind of make a move up. You might have to, you know, downgrade a bit in order
00:42:28.300
to do that somewhere else. All right. So the final one is the underappreciated star. This is someone
00:42:32.800
who's underpaid and undervalued compared to what they bring to the workplace. How do you know if
00:42:38.220
you're an underappreciated star? I think the kind of first thing that you need to question
00:42:43.820
is, are you actually a star? And I give people a few things you can do to figure out if you have
00:42:48.920
a skill that you are both the best at and is rare at work and both need to be true. If you're really
00:42:54.480
good at something that everybody can do, then you're probably not a star. And then the underappreciation
00:42:59.260
part also takes a little bit of interrogating. So I think most underappreciated stars are told
00:43:04.880
they're great, but they're not shown that they're great in any kind of compensation way that they care
00:43:09.880
about. It doesn't have to be money. It can be other perks, whatever the thing is. It's a lot of
00:43:15.120
promising future compensation. And we see this in small organizations and new startups that don't
00:43:20.840
have a lot of money or resources to give out. They will bring in a star and they will promise them the
00:43:26.020
world if they just stick around long enough. So if you're getting a lot of these kind of hypothetical
00:43:30.700
future promises, you know, I've worked for organizations that weren't publicly traded, but they promised me
00:43:36.740
stock once they were in which they made up a number to estimate what that number would look
00:43:41.120
like. Those kinds of things tend to be the forms of underappreciation that people who are at the top
00:43:46.780
of their game experience. One factor that contributes to people becoming underappreciated stars I thought
00:43:52.060
was really incisive is that many companies and organizations are just looking for good enough
00:43:58.360
when hiring. Tell us about this finding. Yeah, I'm a little cynical about the whole star business,
00:44:04.620
partly because I think most companies don't actually want a whole bunch of stars. They might
00:44:09.720
not even be able to afford one star. I think a lot of people who are really, really good are in the
00:44:16.640
99th percentile. They get compensated exponentially more than someone who say the 90th percentile. And so
00:44:24.260
salaries don't go up in a linear way. Starhood increases. They go up exponentially and it's often
00:44:30.360
not worth it to pay these stars. And a lot of places who have hired people like this, who've hired
00:44:36.740
so-called geniuses or kind of the more dark version of that as a super chicken that will kind of peck
00:44:41.600
the eyes out of all the other stars to be number one, they find that this is a mistake and that it's
00:44:47.460
actually better to hire people who are pretty good, who have decent skills, but they don't have the price
00:44:54.340
tag. They don't have the expectations of being treated like they're fancy that come with the true
00:45:00.120
stars that come with, you know, the person who is the CEO at the, you know, Fortune 100 company or
00:45:06.560
whatever. And I think you need to figure out whether there's even a market for your starhood, you know,
00:45:12.400
and most places they can't afford you and they're not actually that interested in bringing someone
00:45:17.120
in who is so, so much more powerful than everybody else. There's a psychological distance that you'll
00:45:21.840
create should you come to that place. Yeah. I imagine this good enough problem is going to
00:45:26.520
become even worse with the introduction of AI into companies. Cause like AI can do a lot of the stuff
00:45:33.400
that starting to be able to do a lot of stuff at white collar jobs. It's not great, but it's good
00:45:38.600
enough. And so companies like, well, instead of paying a human being with, you know, all these
00:45:43.440
advanced degrees, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year to do this job, we'll just use AI that
00:45:48.500
costs us $20,000 a year. Oh, absolutely. And I I'm seeing this, you know, any kind of job in
00:45:54.820
psychology where you're hired as like a consultant to kind of import and export knowledge from science
00:46:01.360
and, you know, make it palatable to the masses. So go summarize these 15 academic articles and make
00:46:07.960
a PowerPoint presentation explaining what growth mindset is. You know, those people used to make
00:46:12.840
like 150 K coming out with a PhD in psychology. Now they make zero K because AI chatbot GBT can do
00:46:19.620
that in five seconds is a little janky. Sure. But someone can take five minutes to kind of make it
00:46:25.820
pretty, you know, add the human touch to it. And so there are just these whole white collar careers
00:46:30.600
that are just, you know, being rapidly shrunk. And anyone who used to kind of be good at summarizing
00:46:36.980
things no longer has a job. And I do think we're seeing kind of more and more of this good enough
00:46:42.040
problem, even cropping up a pretty sophisticated levels like coding and things like that, which we
00:46:46.900
used to just really rely on well-trained computer scientists to do, you know, AI does that just as
00:46:52.320
well, if not better. Yeah. The thing you have to start thinking about is, well, how can I take that
00:46:56.920
skill that can now be used, but you'd be done by AI? Like, how can I take that to the next level,
00:47:02.640
like higher level? Like what can AI not do? And maybe AI can't make those bigger connections. I don't
00:47:08.860
know. I'm just kind of shooting off the hip here. Yeah. I mean, I could tell you the
00:47:12.020
jobs AI can't do that people are really desperate for is anything in hospitality, in healthcare,
00:47:19.180
any human interfacing jobs where you have to actually talk to people. So not like back office
00:47:25.000
jobs where you can chat with your Bank of America app or whatever, but anything that involves like a
00:47:31.100
complex human interaction of any form. And whether that means making a salad or talking to a client
00:47:37.100
or giving, you know, someone a shot in the arm, those are the jobs that people are really distrustful
00:47:44.160
of AI. Even like ironically things that AI could be better at, like radiology and, you know, reading
00:47:49.880
scans, there's a complete distrust. I have a paper on like the trust of this kind of machine stuff.
00:47:56.200
There's a distrust when there's no human eyes on it. And so, you know, ironically, even some of these
00:48:01.040
things that AI is getting better at, people still want to hire people for as kind of the last stop.
00:48:06.720
And I think, you know, anything like that, if you're a new career person listening to this
00:48:11.560
human interfacing stuff where people want to talk to another human being, those are the jobs you need
00:48:16.860
to start looking into. Well, Tessa, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:48:20.920
more about the book and your work? So you can go to tessawestauthor.com to take the quizzes from
00:48:27.540
job therapy and from Jerks at Work as well. If you want to read about my research, you can go to
00:48:32.440
tessawestlab.com. Fantastic. Well, Tessa West, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:36.960
Thank you so much. My guest today was Dr. Tessa West. She's the author of the book Job Therapy. It's
00:48:42.800
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her
00:48:46.240
website, tessawestauthor.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash job therapy,
00:48:51.700
where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:01.260
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:49:04.940
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00:49:08.440
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