The Art of Manliness - How to Know When It's Time to Break Up With Your Job

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.440 You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner.

00:00:15.440 You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job,

00:00:19.200 a quite serious one, in fact. After all, you spend a third of your life working.

00:00:23.300 Just like the relationship you have with your significant other,

00:00:25.700 there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job.

00:00:27.700 You can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way,

00:00:31.420 you can end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated.

00:00:35.840 And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways.

00:00:39.880 Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West,

00:00:43.180 professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works For You.

00:00:48.440 Tessa interviewed thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes

00:00:52.000 and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes.

00:00:55.460 Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles

00:00:59.460 and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company

00:01:02.560 or move on altogether and even change careers.

00:01:05.920 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash jobtherapy.

00:01:20.460 All right, Tessa West, welcome back to the show.

00:01:22.640 Thank you again for having me.

00:01:25.040 So we had you on last time to discuss your book, Jerks at Work, and it's how to deal with those 0.97

00:01:29.080 jerks that you sometimes encounter at the office. You got a new book out called Job Therapy, 0.98

00:01:34.380 where you dig into our relationship with our job. And I think a lot of people typically don't think

00:01:40.300 about having a relationship with their work. You know, a job is just something you do.

00:01:45.400 What got you thinking about work in terms of a relationship?

00:01:48.960 Yeah, this is a great question. I think, you know, a bunch of different things. But just to kind of

00:01:54.940 give you a little bit of background, I've been teaching a close relationships class at New York

00:01:59.240 University now for 15 years. And so I've been thinking about how we go from the kind of initial

00:02:05.580 attraction stage, so the first date, which is a lot like a first interview, you know, all the way

00:02:10.560 through that stage where we get a little bit itchy and we start drifting apart from our partner,

00:02:15.920 the ambivalence, those feelings we have that are a little bit complicated, the emotional ups and

00:02:20.820 downs, and all the way through the end of a relationship when we decide to break up.

00:02:25.420 And what I noticed in the past couple years is that there's just been kind of this shift in how

00:02:30.180 we talk about work using these relational concepts. And so, you know, every time I taught, and this was

00:02:36.160 last semester, we would talk about, you know, what can go wrong on a first date. And at the same time

00:02:41.660 in my consulting and in my research studying the workplace, people were asking me the same types

00:02:46.740 of questions about interviews. And when they were trying to process whether they should break up with

00:02:51.300 a job that they've been committed to for a long time, they would ask me questions about identity

00:02:55.800 loss, like this hole in my heart, how am I going to fill it? And that's the same language we're using

00:03:00.160 around marriages. And so I started to kind of see these two worlds I live in converging and these

00:03:05.180 concepts starting to overlap in ways that I think most of us had never really thought of before.

00:03:09.980 And that's really when I decided to adopt a relational perspective to think about your

00:03:14.420 career as just another thing that you have a relationship with, much like a person.

00:03:18.740 So a lot of people are unhappy with their current jobs, but they're unhappy for different reasons.

00:03:23.060 If you ask five different people why they don't like their job or their career, they might give

00:03:27.000 you five different reasons. And you took a deep dive to find out what are the top reasons

00:03:31.920 people are unhappy at work. So you did this massive survey. What did you discover?

00:03:36.060 You know, I think most of us, if you ask someone why, they don't truly know. And so you kind of

00:03:42.940 have to ask more indirectly about how they're feeling. And so what I found was that a big

00:03:48.360 chunk of people, especially those who've been working for a really long time, they have a 0.99

00:03:52.900 crisis of identity. They used to love this thing. And the thing is, you know, tends to treat them

00:03:57.360 very well. The career does. But they don't feel as strongly identified with it as they used to.

00:04:02.380 And there's a lot of shame and guilt that goes along with that. So that is, you know, the

00:04:06.260 crisis of identity person.

00:04:09.040 Kind of in a similar vein is the person who's drifted apart from their job. And this is the

00:04:13.280 person who's pretty nostalgic about what that job used to look like. It could be that the

00:04:17.800 whole industry has changed. Maybe it's just this company. But it's a little bit like waking

00:04:22.040 up and looking at your spouse in bed and thinking, who are you? I don't recognize this person

00:04:26.100 anymore. And for those people, they really have to dig deep to understand kind of what is the

00:04:30.880 source of that drifting apart? Is it really just the job or is it also them? And then the

00:04:35.980 third is the person who's stretched too thin. And I actually wrote this chapter for everybody.

00:04:40.600 I think we all know what it feels like to be juggling multiple roles or tasks or to be

00:04:44.920 task switching all the time that we're not getting anything done. And so those individuals tend

00:04:49.440 to have taken a few missteps along the way in terms of absorbing roles or taking on what

00:04:54.580 I call high visibility roles that they think will get them a raise or promotion, get them on the

00:05:00.220 map, so to speak. But they end up just kind of being all over the place or interrupting themselves

00:05:05.060 constantly at work. And then the last two chapters are for people who are not getting the love back

00:05:12.160 from their careers. So there's the runner-up. We all probably, if you've worked long enough,

00:05:16.840 you know what it feels like to get passed up for raises and promotions. And you don't really know

00:05:21.360 why. There's a huge kind of gap there between their understanding of what they're doing wrong

00:05:25.440 and what leaders think they should be doing instead. And then the underappreciated star,

00:05:30.080 the person who gets a lot of, you know, nice Slack messages or emails, but the real rewards

00:05:36.100 aren't coming. And they're often kind of dangled in front of them in some sort of like hypothetical

00:05:40.320 future. You know, if you stick here long enough, you'll get that president job in a year and then

00:05:45.700 eventually the C-suite. And, you know, once we have enough money, you'll get that bonus. And so they

00:05:51.420 really have to figure out if they can get compensated better elsewhere and how much

00:05:56.080 organizations actually even really care about hiring stars. So those last two chapters are

00:06:00.200 really about trying to get the love from that relationship with your career back that you are

00:06:04.620 feeling towards it. Okay. So these are the top five. We got the crisis of identity, the drifted apart,

00:06:10.260 the stretch too thin, the runner-up, the underappreciated star. We're going to dig into each of these here in

00:06:14.860 the conversation. But you also found before we talk about these five different types of

00:06:20.260 dissatisfaction profiles, you also talked about there might be a lot of job dissatisfaction that

00:06:25.360 just comes up from like daily stressors that we tend to overlook with a job. It's not even that

00:06:31.940 you don't identify with your job anymore or you feel like you're stretched too thin. It's just the

00:06:36.220 other stuff that we overlook when it comes to having a job that might be causing us dissatisfaction.

00:06:40.640 What sorts of stressors are those? Yeah, I think, you know, most of us experience a lot of low-level

00:06:47.320 stress at work, but we don't actually see how it kind of builds up and affects our happiness at work

00:06:52.320 or our engagement or these kind of like bigger picture things. And I think what I did for this

00:06:56.960 chapter was I ran a simple study where I asked people in the morning, what do you think is going

00:07:00.500 to stress you out today? You know, what your biggest stressor is going to be? And then I asked

00:07:04.580 them again to do it in the evening. What actually stressed you out? And there's not a ton of overlap.

00:07:08.880 And I think it's because anticipated stressors tend to be big things. They tend to be things like

00:07:14.100 a presentation I have to give, a meeting I'm really nervous about. What people reported are

00:07:19.920 what I would call like certainty-based stressors, things that they can anticipate and then plan for.

00:07:25.800 And because you can plan for those things, you actually don't end up experiencing that much

00:07:30.040 stress. You put some steps in place to make sure you can handle the thing. You know, we call this a

00:07:35.460 challenge response in health psychology. But what ends up actually stressing people out are pretty

00:07:40.820 small things. And many of them, we tell ourselves we can't anticipate, but we actually can if we're

00:07:46.300 a little bit more strategic. A commute that ran too long. Your parking space has been taken up.

00:07:51.820 Your boss putting a last minute deadline on your calendar. Someone interrupting you at work.

00:07:57.340 Those things that we don't really see coming in the morning, but they end up being additive and

00:08:01.920 really stressing us out. But kind of ironically, what I found is that even for those things,

00:08:06.300 if you ask someone if they've experienced it before, they'll tell you,

00:08:09.280 oh yeah, I experience this all the time. They just don't encode it as a stressful thing.

00:08:14.040 And so they don't think about it again and they don't plan for it. But most of the time,

00:08:18.840 we've had that last minute meeting put on our calendar. We've had that commute go long. We've

00:08:23.260 had our parking space stolen and so forth. So if we just kind of keep track of these things,

00:08:27.340 we can actually do a much better job of mitigating their effects on us.

00:08:30.800 And what that can do, I think a lot of people, my experience, those were daily stressors,

00:08:34.420 mundane stressors. They think, well, I just hate my career. I hate my job. Well,

00:08:38.180 maybe your career and job's fine. You just got to take care of those things like the job or career

00:08:42.520 you have right now. It'll be great. Yeah. I think we tend to catastrophize a little bit when we've

00:08:48.600 had an accumulation of small stressors. It's a little like anyone who's been a parent and they

00:08:54.180 have a kid who misses a nap and they just lose it completely and cry over everything. I think

00:08:59.280 there's an adult version of that, which is an accumulation of small daily stressors.

00:09:04.260 They affect our health. They affect our sleep. And that in turn affects our ability to cognitively

00:09:10.180 function, to regulate our emotions at work, to handle difficulties that come flying at us. And

00:09:16.000 I think that we do dramatically underestimate the effects of those low-level things. And then we

00:09:21.760 catastrophize and tell ourselves, oh my gosh, this job just isn't a good fit for me. I feel really

00:09:26.840 miserable right now. But because we haven't identified the source, we attribute it to something big and

00:09:31.960 existential. And that's where I think your first step is just to keep track of those low-level

00:09:36.640 things to try to correct for those before you get into the deep kind of psychological issues you might

00:09:41.900 be experiencing. Okay. So let's dig into those deep psychological issues. Let's say you took care

00:09:46.200 of all those stressors and you're still not feeling happy with your job. Your book is designed to help

00:09:50.720 you figure out why you might be unhappy with your job or career. And that first one you said is the

00:09:56.980 crisis of identity. And this is someone who starts a job or career. It's a good fit initially. They

00:10:03.380 enjoy at the beginning. They actually get really good at their career job. But then they start having

00:10:08.280 second thoughts. So what are some signs that the crisis of identity is the reason you're unhappy with

00:10:15.060 your job? So I think there's two things that you need to do. You know, I give you kind of this

00:10:20.080 checklist of, is your career identity a central part of who you are? And a lot of people who are

00:10:25.860 having a crisis of identity still say yes to that question. Things like, when I think about, for me,

00:10:30.540 when I think about being a professor, that's really important to how I see myself. It's central to my

00:10:35.220 self-esteem. So you want to measure that and you want to measure it over time. Because I think we

00:10:39.940 have days in which we feel highly identified with our work and days when we feel less identified.

00:10:45.160 You want to measure how stable that so-called identity centrality is over time. But the second core

00:10:50.860 piece is what we call identity satisfaction. And so you can be really identified with your career.

00:10:56.040 It can be a core piece of who you see yourself as a person and hate it at the same time. Hate the fact

00:11:01.600 that your self-esteem is yoked to this thing, that this thing doesn't bring you happiness.

00:11:06.580 And I think a lot of people having a crisis of identity kind of fall into that dangerous quadrant

00:11:10.840 of high centrality and low satisfaction. We see this a lot in healthcare, with burnout and things like

00:11:17.660 that. And that can create a lot of ambivalence in people, where you sort of love and hate your

00:11:22.760 job at the same exact time. And that, to me, is the big warning sign. Not that you hate your job

00:11:28.780 consistently, but that you feel like it's a core piece of you and you're not happy with it. And you

00:11:34.680 kind of love and hate it on and off, often within the same day. In relationship science, this kind of

00:11:39.740 heightened sense of ambivalence tends to be what predicts when people break up. Not so much just

00:11:44.520 consistently being negative, but feeling really kind of angsty inside when you think about your

00:11:49.700 career. Yeah. Your crisis of identity, that high centrality, low satisfaction. It's like your job's

00:11:55.880 your frenemy, right? Like you love it and hate it. We've had podcast guests talking about that's like

00:12:00.280 the worst type of relationship you want to have with somebody. Yeah. It is the biggest predictor of

00:12:06.440 getting into an on-again, off-again relationship. If you don't actually sort of resolve that identity

00:12:11.240 centrality and you start kind of exploring new identities before you leave, that's really key.

00:12:17.160 Otherwise, it's just like breaking up with your ex and getting back together because you have nothing

00:12:21.560 to kind of fill the void. The same thing can happen at work. Give us some more concrete examples of what

00:12:26.580 it would look like if you had high career identity centrality. You think of yourself as ex-profession,

00:12:34.040 but low satisfaction. And what contributes to that low satisfaction?

00:12:37.500 It's a lot of intermittent reinforcement at work, I think, that really does that. That puts you in

00:12:43.720 that unique quadrant. It is your boss reinforcing you in a way that is difficult to predict. You don't

00:12:51.220 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

00:12:55.220 to get ignored or told you're doing poorly. It's a very unpredictable reinforcement schedule. And we know

00:13:00.820 from behavioral science that that's the best way to keep people yoked to something that they don't

00:13:05.540 actually love. And so if you are getting reinforced, but if you keep track of that reinforcement,

00:13:10.900 and by reinforcement, I just mean anything from a bonus or raise, those are big forms of reinforcement

00:13:15.120 to small ones, like people recognizing your contributions at work. If you can't predict

00:13:19.920 when you're going to be positively reinforced for what you're doing at work, then you're going to get

00:13:25.300 really strongly pulled into that pattern where you have a hard time letting go. In fact,

00:13:30.480 reinforcement, it works on monkeys, it works on rats, it works on humans and relationships. And I think

00:13:36.720 it actually makes you more identified with something than even just getting positively

00:13:40.800 reinforced consistently does. There's something about the uncertainty, the lack of predictability

00:13:45.700 that really keeps people tethered to these things that they don't love. And I think that's where it

00:13:50.460 gets a little bit scary. Okay. So if your identity centrality is high and your identity

00:13:54.600 satisfaction is low, that might be an instance where your career is fine. Your chosen career is great.

00:14:00.180 You just need to find maybe another place to do that career.

00:14:04.500 Yes. I think the biggest mistake people make is they act on that identity satisfaction and think

00:14:09.780 they should just completely pivot to something new. And then they realize a little bit into that

00:14:15.420 journey that, oh, wait, I actually kind of missed my old thing. Well, you need to measure your

00:14:19.840 centrality around that old career before you make that pivot. So if you have that low satisfaction,

00:14:25.440 before you pivot, you want to make sure that that identity centrality is consistently low for a period

00:14:31.340 of time. And so you're absolutely right. If you find high centrality, identity centrality consistently

00:14:36.820 for a while, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple of months or whatever, then you probably are just

00:14:41.180 more in a place where you want to stick with your career, but need to find it elsewhere.

00:14:45.440 Okay. What happens if you have low identity centrality with your career? Let's say you're a professor

00:14:50.540 and at the beginning of your career, you think, or you feel like this is what I was meant to do.

00:14:55.480 I enjoy doing this. I enjoy being a professor. But then 10 years later, you're just not feeling

00:15:00.580 it anymore. It doesn't seem like that's what you're supposed to be doing. How do you go about

00:15:04.940 trying to figure out what your next career is? Like, how do you go about making that big change from

00:15:11.140 professor to something else? Yeah. I think the first step you want to do, and this scares people,

00:15:16.760 but I think before you quit your job, you know, is you actually need to start dating new identities.

00:15:25.600 And I probably take this metaphor too far, but you need to actually kind of try on new identities,

00:15:30.640 develop a clear sense of what your future identity is going to look like before you make any moves.

00:15:36.080 And, you know, the only real way to do that, it isn't by reading company websites or taking extra

00:15:40.740 courses. It's by networking and having, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations with people

00:15:45.840 in new careers where you can do things like tell the difference between two things that sound

00:15:51.200 similar, but are actually super different or learn the hidden curriculum around what it really takes

00:15:56.480 to succeed or learn jargon, which I know gets a bad reputation, but we use it anyway. So really kind

00:16:02.040 of exploring these new careers to develop just a clear sense of what your future identity looks like

00:16:07.380 or could potentially be before you ever take that next step. And I think too many of us are

00:16:13.140 attempted to quit, take some time off, take some extra courses, apply for jobs before we do that

00:16:20.420 whole developing the new identity thing. We think we can't develop an identity around a career we

00:16:25.660 haven't jumped into or haven't tried yet, but I actually don't think that's true at all. I think

00:16:29.900 you can actually start to understand what that identity would look like should you be in it by

00:16:34.600 doing this networking. And I think that's a really important kind of in-between step people need

00:16:38.420 to do. Yeah. So before you quit, talk to a bunch of people who were in that career you're thinking

00:16:42.540 about. I think another thing you could do too is like do some moonlighting. Maybe you want to be

00:16:46.860 a writer. Well, try moonlighting as a writer while you still have your job or you're like, oh, I hate

00:16:52.700 my corporate job. I want to become a pool cleaning guy. Like start cleaning pools and see what it's

00:16:59.520 like on, you know, do it on the weekends, for example. Yeah. You have to try it out. I think,

00:17:04.540 you know, I, I meet all kinds of people who think a career would be a good fit for them because they

00:17:09.860 think really big picture in terms of it. You know, someone wants to be a nurse who I talk to

00:17:15.120 because she cares about helping people and she really wanted to just do that. But, you know,

00:17:19.860 and she got trained as a nurse during COVID. So very, very little hands-on training, but then she

00:17:24.860 kind of realized she hated the sight of blood and cleaning up poop, which turns out to be like 80%

00:17:29.200 of your job as a nurse. And those just kind of like, what is the day in the life actually look like

00:17:35.300 is something that you can't know unless you actually kind of try the job on a little bit

00:17:40.360 and try it. And I think the moonlighting piece is really important. I think people are afraid to do

00:17:45.020 that or they feel like they don't have the time or the mental resources to do it, but you're not

00:17:49.460 going to know how that new job feels, whether it fits you, unless you actually sample it a little

00:17:54.140 bit first. You know, people can have this problem even at the start of their careers. I went to law

00:17:58.700 school. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer since I was in high school because my idea of being a lawyer

00:18:02.660 was like watching Matlock and law and order. And then I went to law school and I had to do my

00:18:08.220 internship and I did my first internship at a big firm. I hated it. I absolutely, like, it just did

00:18:13.700 not suit my personality. So yeah, that can happen at the beginning. So I think I would have been

00:18:17.780 better served before going to law school. Like actually, I didn't know any attorneys too. I just

00:18:22.280 thought, you know, I had no clue what it meant to be a lawyer. I think it would have been better

00:18:27.020 served to maybe talk to a bunch of lawyers, maybe like in high school or college, worked there for

00:18:32.520 the summer to see what it was like. That would have been helpful. I think, yeah, I would add

00:18:38.080 another piece of advice, which is like when you're doing this, the temptation is to find a bunch of

00:18:42.580 people who kind of know each other and network that way. So, you know, you find a lawyer and then

00:18:47.980 you ask that lawyer for another lawyer you can talk to. And we call that snowball sampling. It's a

00:18:53.300 great way to network. But when you do that, you get a lot of overlapping information about a career

00:18:57.720 because those people have things in common with each other that might not actually reflect what it's

00:19:01.720 going to look like for you. So you want to actually network with people who don't know each

00:19:05.960 other, who don't have completely shared histories or even work in the same organization because you

00:19:11.640 want to look for that kind of, you know, signal in the noise across all these diverse people to 0.99

00:19:16.600 understand what the career could really look like. I think one big misstep people do is they talk to

00:19:21.660 10 people, all of whom have the same boss or work for the same organization. And then they overgeneralize

00:19:27.460 those 10 people's experiences to what that career would look like for them. And then there's just

00:19:32.640 nothing in common. And I think you really have to really broaden your network in that early,

00:19:38.020 early stage. Talk to, you know, a litigator for you, but also maybe someone who works for the county,

00:19:43.540 all kinds of law, you know, just to get a little bit of sense of the heterogeneity of the career.

00:19:49.360 And then when you're talking to people, you have this great question to ask to really get

00:19:52.200 information you otherwise wouldn't get to really figure out what it's like to have this career.

00:19:57.460 And the question is, before I started this job, nobody told me that and then have the person

00:20:02.380 finish. Cause then you might learn some things that you, you probably didn't know and wouldn't

00:20:08.760 have even known to ask. Yeah, I think I love this question. It's based on this NPR, really funny

00:20:15.400 thing they did of, I must've missed that day where people talk about late knowledge that they

00:20:19.940 accumulated. And I gave this survey to a bunch of people and I got like really wild answers,

00:20:25.440 you know, all kinds of things from like weird hidden norms. Like I didn't know that I had to

00:20:29.240 bring chocolate once a week to the boss too. I didn't realize that as part of my job running,

00:20:35.020 you know, this art gallery, I had to lift heavy boxes. And most of the things people reported were

00:20:41.540 extra roles and responsibilities that they were assumed to do, that it was normative to do,

00:20:46.460 but they were not hired to do. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we actually drift apart

00:20:51.040 from our job or have an identity crisis is because of this sort of like lack of role clarity being

00:20:55.420 asked to do random stuff that has nothing to do the job. So you want to, you want to get a sense of

00:21:00.140 what, what weird randomness you might encounter should you take on this career. And I think the

00:21:05.880 answers are, will surprise you. And people are always a little bit surprised when they get asked that

00:21:10.120 question, but they come up with like pretty interesting and creative answers. So that was kind of one of the

00:21:14.220 more fun things I did for this book. Okay. So with crisis of identity, you want to look at your

00:21:18.280 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 0.98

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

00:38:22.660 make sure your contributions get recognized?

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 at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:49:08.440 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done

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00:49:15.420 out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend

00:49:19.080 or family member. You think we've got something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued

00:49:22.660 support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast with Put What You've

00:49:27.000 Heard into Action.

The Art of Manliness - July 24, 2024

How to Know When It's Time to Break Up With Your Job

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