Bonus: Take Control of your Inner Propaganda

00:00:10:20 – 00:00:34:02

Aoife O’Brien

I talked about this notion or this concept of beliefs in a tiny, tiny part of the Thriving Talent book. I think it’s so fundamental to understand what shapes our beliefs and how we can change them, which was why I was so excited to have my conversation with Owen Fitzpatrick on the podcast. Today’s bonus episode is a synopsis of that conversation.

00:00:34:02 – 00:00:43:09

Aoife O’Brien

It’s my key takeaways. What did I take from the conversation, and what are the specific actions that you can take today to make the changes that you want to make?

00:00:43:09 – 00:00:52:25

Aoife O’Brien

This is the Happier at Work podcast. I’m your host, Aoife O’Brien, and this is a bonus episode all about beliefs at work and your own inner propaganda.

00:00:52:25 – 00:01:20:26

Aoife O’Brien

I think it’s important to start with what is a belief. So a belief is an idea that we feel certain about. And I never really heard beliefs articulated in that way. We often think that they’re facts or they’re the truth, or there’s something that’s true for us, but it’s an idea that we feel certain about. And another way that Owen went on to explain it is that the degrees of certainty can change.

00:01:20:26 – 00:01:42:12

Aoife O’Brien

They can fluctuate depending on where you are. So it operates on a kind of a continuum, which is good news because it means that we can influence other people’s beliefs, but not just that we can influence our own beliefs as well. We can change the kinds of things that we actually believe in. And I’ll talk a little bit more about how to do that shortly.

00:01:42:12 – 00:02:13:16

Aoife O’Brien

The other important thing worth noting is that our beliefs are also context dependent, depending on our mood or the feelings that we have at any given time. And you’ll be very familiar with this. If you’ve ever had a really good day, and then you think about all of the other positive things that are happening in your life, or if you’ve had a terrible day, or if you’ve received a rejection or some bad news and you kind of spiral into this, oh my God, I’m totally doomed.

00:02:13:16 – 00:02:28:28

Aoife O’Brien

I’m not good enough. And you think of all of the other times when this has happened as well. So those are the beliefs that we have ourselves about ourselves. And they’re also shaped by the feelings that we have in any given moment.

00:02:28:28 – 00:02:49:15

Aoife O’Brien

One of the ways that we can manage our beliefs is to recognize the feeling that we’re having. So giving a name to something that we’re experiencing will help us to recognize that that’s something that’s happening. It can also help us to question whether or not what we’re telling ourselves is actually true.

00:02:49:15 – 00:03:11:01

Aoife O’Brien

Another thing that we can do by recognizing those feelings is understanding what is within our control. Because not everything is in our control, and there are certain things that are out of our control, but there are certain things that are in our control. Our behavior and our actions, for example, are within our control. There are also other areas that we can influence.

00:03:11:01 – 00:03:27:15

Aoife O’Brien

So we may not be able to control them, but we have a degree of influence over them. And so I think understanding what is firmly within our control and what’s within our circle of influence, and accepting the things that are completely out of our control really helps.

00:03:27:15 – 00:03:49:13

Aoife O’Brien

We can also recognize it as our own inner propaganda. And I love that term. I think it’s so catchy and really interesting way to understand it. It’s not the voice in your head, it’s your inner propaganda. It’s a story that you’re trying to sell yourself. It’s a belief that you’re trying to create about yourself, but you don’t have to buy your own inner propaganda.

00:03:49:13 – 00:04:17:08

Aoife O’Brien

Another interesting thing that Owen shared is that by learning to not always trust that voice that you have in your head, you can learn to trust yourself more, to learn to trust your own judgment. And this is something that I had feedback on recently, and I think it’s quite interesting. How much do we default to the opinions of other people, or worry about what other people are going to say about us, or say to us?

00:04:17:08 – 00:04:36:17

Aoife O’Brien

I loved Owen’s phrase as well about taking a bet on yourself, so trusting yourself and going for it regardless of the circumstances are reframing something that is negative into something that’s positive or taking action regardless, is taking a bet on yourself.

00:04:36:17 – 00:04:47:25

Aoife O’Brien

Another reframe that Owen talked about is this idea of being antifragile. And that’s the idea that we’re going to grow from this experience. So he mentioned the idea of

00:04:47:26 – 00:04:56:01

Aoife O’Brien

post-traumatic growth when something negative happens, but we grow instead of being negatively impacted by it.

00:04:56:01 – 00:05:15:03

Aoife O’Brien

So you can talk about this serves to make me better. And he said in the engineering and science world, they talk about this is my prior. So this is all of the information I’m coming with. This is what has happened in the past. And you can use that to inform what you do. But you don’t have to believe all of that.

00:05:15:04 – 00:05:27:09

Aoife O’Brien

You can say “clean slate” and take things forward. I think that’s a really refreshing approach, because sometimes we let whatever has happened in the past to impact us negatively on what we want to achieve in the future.

00:05:27:09 – 00:05:52:18

Aoife O’Brien

I asked Owen as well about what leaders can do to really influence how this shows up at work. I think it’s really important to understand this, and the default tends to be using stats and using data and things like that, like that stuff we’re so comfortable with. I don’t think we’re really comfortable talking about feelings at work. It’s not certainly anything that we really spoke about when I was at work.

00:05:52:18 – 00:06:19:21

Aoife O’Brien

You don’t really talk about feelings. Feelings are something that you park at the door. Thankfully, I’m seeing a big change in organizations of getting this sort of stuff out there, but one of the ways that we can do that is by using stories. And Owen, very genius, turned the question back on me during our conversation, and he asked me, how did I aim to influence people by, you know, with my Thriving Talent book.

00:06:19:22 – 00:06:39:20

Aoife O’Brien

And I was all about stories. It’s creating stories. It’s sharing personal stories that people can relate to, is also sharing publicly available stories that people also can relate to those stories. That’s how you remember. That’s how to evoke feelings in people is by telling stories.

00:06:39:20 – 00:07:03:10

Aoife O’Brien

Another question I had was around this us and them, because I’ve been there, I’ve been the us and I’ve been the them. And I wanted to understand a little bit more about how to dismantle that, because it seems to be rife in some organizations for sure, whether it’s, you know, depending on the level that you’re at, it can be depending on which team you’re in, all of these things.

00:07:03:10 – 00:07:32:19

Aoife O’Brien

But there’s like a rivalry. And, you know, we kind of jokingly talked about both being from Dublin, but he’s from the South side. I’m from the north side. So we could find that point of difference if you look for it. But if you spend time instead finding that collective, finding that commonality with other people and forging that, and as leaders, cultivating that attitude within the organization rather than cultivating a division and an us and them.

00:07:32:19 – 00:07:49:18

Aoife O’Brien

If I think about that and, you know, an example that comes to my mind is creating a divide. You know, one of the organizations I worked in, you had to be at a certain level to get a certain kind of phone. So you have like an old style phone up until you’re at level seven and then level six and above.

00:07:49:19 – 00:08:01:05

Aoife O’Brien

They were getting the new iPhones. And those kinds of policies serve to show that people are different, that we’re not all on the same team, and that you have to be at a certain level. And to me, it

00:08:01:05 – 00:08:06:27

Aoife O’Brien

exacerbates that kind of divide that we have at work and creates that us and them culture.

00:08:07:00 – 00:08:39:23

Aoife O’Brien

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00:08:39:24 – 00:08:46:28

Aoife O’Brien

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00:08:46:28 – 00:08:47:20

Aoife O’Brien

Another

00:08:47:20 – 00:09:08:07

Aoife O’Brien

tool that you can use to do this is asking questions. So what will happen if we don’t do this using that coaching approach. And then people will fill their minds with their own answers. Even if they don’t share what’s going on, they will have an idea. And that evokes emotions, that creates a story in their mind.

00:09:08:07 – 00:09:33:04

Aoife O’Brien

He shared something interesting about empathy as well. And I think, you know, we’re bringing much more empathy into work. But he made the case against empathy from another book that he has read as well. And the idea being that if you empathize with one group or if you call yourself as belonging to one group, then you are not empathizing with another group.

00:09:33:08 – 00:09:47:22

Aoife O’Brien

And to cultivate that culture of commonality, we need to look for those commonalities rather than deciding that we’re part of one tribe and we’re not part of another tribe specifically.

00:09:47:22 – 00:09:59:22

Aoife O’Brien

Another really interesting part of the book that I wanted to ask him about on the podcast is this idea of the fear of success. So this is something I talk enough a lot about in relation to imposter syndrome.

00:09:59:22 – 00:10:10:00

Aoife O’Brien

When I work with organizations, it is one of the imposter identities that I’ve identified. So there are specific people who are afraid of success.

00:10:10:03 – 00:10:32:07

Aoife O’Brien

And I wanted Owen’s perspective on like why that actually is. And so he shared some interesting examples from all over the world. So in Ireland we have this thing called notions. And that’s, you know, when you get too big for your boots or when you get above your station, people will say that you have notions and it’s designed to keep us where we are.

00:10:32:12 – 00:10:52:14

Aoife O’Brien

In Australia, for example, you have the tall poppy syndrome. In Japan, you have the nail that sticks out the most is the one that gets hit the hardest. So there are examples from all over the world. Basically, putting your head above the parapet in some way is going to attract negative criticism.

00:10:52:16 – 00:10:57:19

Aoife O’Brien

How we can overcome this is defining really clearly what success means for us.

00:10:57:20 – 00:11:08:10

Aoife O’Brien

And I know that’s really hard because societally we think success means we have a big house and a nice car, and we get married and we have children. All of these things, we’re told

00:11:08:10 – 00:11:15:10

Aoife O’Brien

is what success actually means. We rise through the ladder. We earn a lot of money, we have savings, we have a retirement, whatever that might be.

00:11:15:11 – 00:11:30:05

Aoife O’Brien

But if you think for you what to success actually mean and surround yourself with the people who have a similar version of success to you so that you can support each other with that version of success.

00:11:30:05 – 00:11:52:10

Aoife O’Brien

One part of this is if you do become more successful and especially visible. So in my case, in Owen’s case, the more visible we get, the more open we are to trolling. And in some ways you can say that’s a positive thing because they’re talking about you. They’re not talking about someone else. But it still stings when someone has something negative to say about

00:11:52:12 – 00:12:13:11

Aoife O’Brien

then there’s also the friends. There is the friends that are there for, you know, through thick and thin. There are the friends who are happy when they see you successful. And then there’s the friends who are unhappy when you’re successful. So you have to bear that in mind as well. One of the interesting things I took from the book and, you know, and I had to write this down as a quote,

00:12:13:13 – 00:12:26:09

Aoife O’Brien

the idea being that the more successful you are, or we’re afraid to become successful because we become a stranger to the people we love, and we’re afraid of not belonging to that group that we’ve belonged to for such

00:12:26:09 – 00:12:39:10

Aoife O’Brien

a long time. I’m certainly noticing this myself through my own perception. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything differently, but some friends have just kind of fallen away, and I feel like I’m not part of that group anymore.

00:12:39:10 – 00:13:03:23

Aoife O’Brien

There’s one thing for sure is you’re going to be judged. The more success you have, people are going to judge you no matter what. And something that I see often on the internet is if people are going to judge you either way, they may as well judge you for doing something that you really want to do and for being who you actually are, rather than judging you for someone who you actually are not.

00:13:03:23 – 00:13:07:14

Aoife O’Brien

something else that trips us up when we look at this is,

00:13:07:14 – 00:13:24:28

Aoife O’Brien

this perception that will have had success once, can I actually get success again? And this happens all the time. And this is again, this is the imposter syndrome coming up. This is the Maya Angelou had that, you know, I’ve written so many books, but the next one, they’re really going to find out.

00:13:25:00 – 00:13:38:25

Aoife O’Brien

We always feel like you’re only as good as the last book, and this next one is not going to be as good. And we do this, you know, and this is the, again, the inner propaganda that we’re telling ourselves. It’s a story that we’re trying to tell ourselves.

00:13:38:25 – 00:14:02:29

Aoife O’Brien

I loved this idea that Owen shared as well about success, being on your own terms and his term, his version of success is keeping improving all the time. So learning, taking any opportunities to learn and to grow and that you should always be slaying bigger and bigger dragons. Whatever new challenge comes along, you know that you’ve slayed the dragon the last time.

00:14:02:29 – 00:14:07:09

Aoife O’Brien

This one, the next one is going to be slightly bigger, but you know that you can do

00:14:07:12 – 00:14:32:17

Aoife O’Brien

We also talked about culture. I was really curious about to get his take on culture because and again, I cover this in the Thriving Talent book, the idea that culture is shaped around stories, but also we may come from one culture into another culture, and it’s quite different. And a way to really embed the culture is to have those stories and those rituals and to share those stories.

00:14:32:17 – 00:14:56:04

Aoife O’Brien

We talked about that a little bit earlier, but sharing the story. So what does success actually look like? And rather than sharing stats, share actual stories from something that’s happened, for example, in the Customer Success team, this is a really positive example of something that we’ve seen where customers are really happy, something like that, but really solid examples that you can share.

00:14:56:04 – 00:14:58:12

Aoife O’Brien

And that then becomes the culture.

00:14:58:12 – 00:15:29:07

Aoife O’Brien

If we want to reinforce those behaviors, then it’s thinking about what we’re rewarding. And I’m thinking back to a previous episode with Rebecca Hines where she talked about the measure of success and what people were being rewarded for was the number of AI tokens that they were using. And so people became very individualistic. So thinking about the things that we reward and recognize at work is going to help us to reinforce the beliefs that people have about what it means to work there.

00:15:29:08 – 00:15:38:00

Aoife O’Brien

It will reinforce the identity that they belong to this culture, and it reinforces the culture, and it has them reinforced the culture as well.

00:15:38:00 – 00:15:40:27

Aoife O’Brien

Overall, my conversation with Owen felt very aligned with

00:15:40:27 – 00:16:10:09

Aoife O’Brien

the direction that my thinking has been taking recently in relation to our capabilities at work and the conditions that we find ourselves in, and the conditions for people to do their best work so our beliefs can really shape our individual capability. But the identity and the culture of an organization are reflected in the conditions that we create to enable people to do their best work and to really unlock the capabilities that we have.

00:16:10:11 – 00:16:28:21

Aoife O’Brien

As always, I’d love to know what you thought of the full episode or today’s episode. Do let me know! Reach out and on podcasts and Happier at Work. Get involved in the conversation over on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to leave a rating or review, or share this episode with someone who really needs to hear it today.