Recently, we’ve heard a lot about resiliency, the ability to bounce back from challenge, and grit, that ability to grind away and never give up. But we’ve heard less about hardiness. It turns out hardiness enhances resilience, promotes personal and professional growth, and creates a more adaptive organizational culture.
Today, Dr. Steven Stein and I talk about hardiness and how it differs from both resilience and grit. He breaks down five key components of emotional intelligence and discusses how emotions impact our ability to make (or not make) good decisions. Dr. Stein offers the three C’s of Hardiness and how to improve hardiness to create a more resilient, healthy, and adaptive culture that impacts your bottom line.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- The concept of hardiness breaks down into the 3 Cs: commitment, challenge, and control.
- If your goal is overly ridged or too narrow, it can become detrimental and paralyzing.
- Resilience and hardiness definitely overlap. Where the overlap is, we see continuous improvement and forward motion.
- When you balance emotionality with rationality, you can make better decisions, We call that wisdom.
“Hardiness means I can withstand the difficult situation and I can still deal with you (as a person), I can bring you along and make you stronger, and make the organization stronger.” — Dr. Steven Stein
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About Dr Steven Stein: Clinical psychologist, speaker, best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence for Dummies and Hardiness: Making Stress Work for You to Achieve Your Life Goals
Dr. Steven Stein is a world-renowned clinical psychologist, international best-selling author and sought-after speaker, and founder and Executive Chair of Multi-Health Systems (MHS), a publisher of scientifically validated assessments for over 40 years, which has been named a three-time winner of Profit 100 (fastest growing companies in Canada), one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies since 2013, and Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures (2016, Waterstone).
A leading expert on psychological assessment and emotional intelligence, he has consulted with military and government agencies, including the Canadian Forces, U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, special units of the Pentagon, FBI Academy, as well as corporate organizations, including American Express, Air Canada, Canyon Ranch, Coca-Cola (Mexico), and professional sports teams.
Dr. Stein consults with numerous reality TV shows, including Big Brother Canada, The Amazing Race Canada, MasterChef Canada, Bachelor Canada, Real Housewives of Toronto, Bachelor in Paradise, Blown Away, and many others, providing psychological expertise and candidate selection assessments.
Connect with Dr. Steven Stein
Multi-Health Systems (MHS): mhs.com
Personal Website: stevenstein.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drstevenstein
Book: Emotional Intelligence for Dummies
Book: Hardiness: Making Stress Work for You to Achieve Your Life Goals
Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
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Facebook: Red SliceThreads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. We’ve heard a lot about resiliency in recent years, the ability to bounce back from challenge and grit, that ability to grind away and never give up no matter what, but we’ve heard less about hardiness, and it turns out, hardiness enhances your resilience, promotes personal and professional growth and creates a more adaptive organizational culture, and it has everything to do with empathy. Today, my guest is Dr Steven Stein. He’s a world renowned clinical psychologist, speaker, Best Selling Author of emotional intelligence for dummies and hardiness making stress work for you to achieve your life goals. He’s the founder of multi health systems, a publisher of scientifically validated assessments, and has consulted with many elite military and government agencies, including the Canadian Forces, us, Air Force, Army, Navy, special units of the Pentagon, FBI Academy, as well as companies including American Express, Air Canada, Canyon Ranch, Coca Cola, Mexico and professional sports teams. Dr Stein also consults with numerous reality TV shows, including Big Brother Canada, The Amazing Race Canada, Real Housewives of Toronto, Bachelor in Paradise and many others providing psychological expertise and candidate selection assessments. Today, we talk about what hardiness means and how it’s different from both resiliency and grit. He breaks down the five key components of emotional intelligence and discusses how emotions play into our ability to make or not make good decisions. Dr Stein offers the 3c hardiness and how to improve hardiness to create a more resilient, healthy and adaptive culture that impacts your bottom line. This was such a rich conversation. Take a listen. Dr Steven Stein, welcome to the empathy edge Podcast. I’m excited to have you on to talk about emotional intelligence for dummies and hardiness and your work on reality TV shows, like there’s so much juiciness here.
Dr. Steven Stein 02:49
Thanks, Marie. I’m looking forward to talking about it with you.
Maria Ross 02:53
So you know, we’ve heard in the intro, we heard your impressive bio and all the different organizations you’ve worked with. Let’s talk a little bit about your story quickly. That’s always kind of the first question I ask guests really briefly. How did you even get into this work? What made you want to be a psychologist and doing the really interesting work that you’re doing now?
Dr. Steven Stein 03:12
Well, it’s a pretty unusual route that I took. So I wanted to be a psychologist because I thought it was an interesting area. And I started out looking at sort of health areas like dentistry and medicine, but I really didn’t like blood very much, and I didn’t like pain, so and all my psychology marks, my psychology grades were all like A’s, and my biology grades were like C’s. So psychology, I think, was just calling me, right? So I went into psychology, and I did the typical thing as a psychologist. I worked in the children’s mental health center. I work with families and children and families, and I was also the head of research, so I did a lot of research and clinical work. And what happened was that’s when things took a bit of an odd turn. I’m going back quite a few years, when the micro computers were first invented. There was these two guys named Steve Jobs and Wozniak. Maybe heard of them, so they came up with this thing called an Apple computer. So at the time, I was doing this large research study comparing treatments for these really difficult adolescents. And in order to do my studies, they had to do what we call a pre test before we treated them and then post test after well, these kids, you know, they weren’t the most polite kids, so they told me where I could shove my tests, and that wasn’t very wasn’t very helpful when I’m trying to do research. No, no. So I saw one of these computer machines that just came out, and I saw kids like playing games on them. So I said, What if we put our diagnostic interviews on one of these machines? So I got myself a programmer, and we bought one of these boxes and we put it on, and I had kids, come on, hey, why don’t you just try this and see what you think? Well, the kids just loved it. I was getting all kinds of history that no one else was getting, and in fact, they almost had a lineup at my door of kids telling each other, hey, you got to go. This guy’s computer. So what happened was I eventually published a research study showing that we discovered more about these kids on the computer than all the clinicians that had ever interviewed them. They reported drug use, sexual abuse, attempted suicides. So I published a research paper on that, and I told the hospital. I said, You know what, I like to change the focus of my research into this computerized assessment and do less on the therapy. And they said, no, no, we don’t think so. So still intrigued me, so I took it home at night, and my wife at the time happened to be on maternity leave. We had our first daughter. She worked at an addiction treatment center, so I said, Well, why don’t we just open up a little company and start doing this right? Which is what we did. So we opened up a little company, started selling software diagnostics, two of us, the 345, and we became an overnight success. It’s 40 years later, but we now have over 200 staff. So that kind of took me in these different directions, yeah.
Maria Ross 06:00
And so you know your books, emotional intelligence for dummies and hardiness, making stress work for you to achieve your life goals. Very intriguing, very timely, especially coming out of the period of time we’ve all just come out of. And it’s got to be very heartening to you that mental health is such a focus right now for people, and hopefully not just some trend, you know.
Dr. Steven Stein 06:22
Well, you know, I sort of live with people telling me things were trends for 40 years. Computers were trends, uh, emotional intelligence was a trend, but we’ve been at it. Well, emotional intelligence, we’ve been at for over 25 years. So this is, I don’t really pay much attention to that. I mean, I remember when we first got in the news, when we started emotional intelligence, we were among the pioneers of that concept. And reporters used to ask me, isn’t this just some fad like re engineering or whatever? And I think my response 25 years ago was, listen, as long as there’s more than two people in the world on Earth, emotional intelligence will be important.
Maria Ross 07:01
Oh, exactly. I love that. So let’s dive in, because I love this concept of hardiness that you talk about. Can you talk about some effective methods to build resilience? Because that’s another buzzword right now, right? Building resilience through hardiness and emotional intelligence. Because a lot of people say, you know, and I’m raising a 10 year old, you know how important resilience is, but it seems so elusive, and how is it connected to hardiness and emotional intelligence? There’s kind of a lot of questions in that. But yeah,
Dr. Steven Stein 07:30
pick your pick. Yeah. Well, I’ll start off with what is hardiness. So there’s a lot of comparisons. People are comparing hardiness to resilience, and they are similar. The difference is resilience means when you’re you’re sort of motoring along, something happens, you have a difficult time, and then you eventually recover and get back to where you were with hardiness. What we’ve discovered is people who go along and something happens, some awful thing or whatever, but then you come back even stronger than you were. So that’s the sort of main difference, and what we know about hardiness is really interesting. My co author, Paul Barton, he’s a psychologist. He was the senior psychologist in the US Army, but he was a colonel. He’s a retired colonel, and he was at West Point. And as you probably know, a lot of leadership training is done at West Point, world famous leadership training. So Paul’s had the good fortune to be able to do research on these leaders or coming leaders. And the concept of hardiness has been researched for about 20 years now. So there’s a lot of background to this idea, this concept, and it really breaks down to three things, what we call the three C’s. And the first one is what we call commitment. And commitment means that you basically are engaged in the world. You have a purpose, you have something you’re working towards. You have something in the future, a goal, or it could be you have strong religious beliefs, or something larger than yourself that you’re aiming for. The second one is challenge. And what that refers to is when things become difficult for you in your life, you’re really good at knowing what things you can Oh, sorry. Challenge means you know how to look at it in a different way. You look at it like a puzzle. You sort of step back a little bit and get a little less emotionally involved and say, you know, if I was advising a friend of mine to deal with this problem. What would I have them do? So you have a way of, sort of changing your mindset when you’re looking at the problem. And the third is what we call control, and that’s knowing the difference between those things I can control versus what I can’t. So it’s raining out there. I can’t do anything about the weather, but I can take an umbrella or put on a raincoat. So making that distinction, that’s a simple example, but it gets way more complex in real life. And you know, learning how to deal with those three C’s, we find, and the research has shown, can help you in many ways to become much better at dealing with stress. Okay,
Maria Ross 09:58
so how? Does that apply to a workplace culture? So people listening say, that sounds great. We need more of that. How do you start building that culture of hardiness, of resiliency? Where can folks start?
Dr. Steven Stein 10:16
Okay, so where we tend to start is with the commitment. And what we look at there is, you know, what are we about? I mean, what’s the purpose of our organization? I mean, if you want our own example, we started, you know, my goal was to have psychology and kind of transform it into something that would be good for the world, that people could use, you know, as I started out as a psychologist, I was dealing with families, you know. And how many families can you deal with at a time? And I also was a university adjunct professor, so again, you only have so many students at a time, but in the work that we do, which is in the assessment developing psychological assessments and so on, we’re affecting the lives of at this point, millions of people. So the goal of of our organization and people who work here is to make the world a better place by tools. And we work with clinical samples. We work in public safety with offenders, and we work in organizations. Yeah.
Maria Ross 11:10
So how do you use what are the methods that you use to build resilience through hardiness and emotional intelligence? So
Dr. Steven Stein 11:19
the first thing we do is we do is we sort of find out what the organization stands for, what is our commitment, what is our goal, what do we want to do, and then we look at the ways in which we do it, and when there’s and that gets to the challenge. So things are difficult. We have problems we have so how do we solve our problems? How do we deal with these challenges? How do we step back? We work together. We create teamwork. We find solutions to problems, and we really differentiate the things beyond our control and those that aren’t. So the economy may be bad and our sales are down, right? But what can we do in the interim? Well, maybe we can learn more about our customers, we can do surveys, or we can study our products and maybe even work on new products when we have difficult times in our organization, that’s when we really invest in R, D. So when the economy gets better, we’re ready to roll with new products, and we’re just out of the gate. So it’s using these in a strategic way with your people to get them all on the same page so that they can get through the stressful times.
Maria Ross 12:20
So are companies that you’re working with doing this as like, a big transformation initiative they’re launching. It’s like, okay, it’s announced from on high. This is coming. This is what we’re doing. We’re going to be creating work groups, or does it start more organically, with a group within the organization that says, hey, this is something we want to take a look at within our team, we’re going to assess what our micro culture, what our commitment, challenge and control are, and then does it spread, or is it a comment? You find it happens both
Dr. Steven Stein 12:51
ways. We do mostly organically as you’re describing it. So I mean, ideally you want the buy in of the senior leadership, senior management. Otherwise it’s not going to really sustain so once you have that, and they understand the benefit of this and what how it could be helpful, then you start working with senior groups and working your way through the organization with the different groups. We’ve been doing this much longer with emotional intelligence than we have with with artines, because artines is a newer concept to bring it to the world. So with emotional intelligence, it’s bit of an easier sell, because people now know what it is and they want it, right? So it’s easier to roll that out.
Maria Ross 13:29
Is hardiness actually under, you know, I talk about empathy being sort of under the umbrella of emotional intelligence. Is hardiness similar? Yeah,
Dr. Steven Stein 13:36
that’s a good way of looking at it, yeah. So emotional intelligence, I’ll break that down a bit in terms of the model that we’ve been using. So there’s the five key components to emotional intelligence that we look at so the first is self perception, your ability to be aware of your own emotions, right? And the second is what we call self expression, the ability to express your emotions. If you want to be a leader, you have to know how to express how you feel. You have to be transparent, authentic. People have to see that. You know, you walk the walk, you talk the talk. The third area is interpersonal skills. So you want to have good relationships with people. You don’t want to be the boss who walks into the room and everybody shuts up and won’t talk anymore. When I walk into the room, my staff like to joke with me, and we have fun, right? And the next area is decision making, the role of emotions in helping you make decisions. Some people are over emotional when they make decisions, and some people use no emotion. They think all decisions are rational, which they aren’t. And the fifth area is what we call stress management, and that’s where the hardiness fits in. So people who are high in emotional intelligence are usually pretty good at managing their stress using some of these techniques that we’ve talked about
Maria Ross 14:44
well, and is that as a result of the other elements? Because if you are self aware and you’re able to express yourself, you’re probably going to be able to manage your stress a little bit better, because you understand your triggers, your emotions when you need to take a break, when you need to pull back. Do you. Think so they’re all interrelated, yes, exactly,
Dr. Steven Stein 15:01
exactly. That’s exactly how it works and and that’s exactly how we work through the cycle of emotional intelligence. It’s
Maria Ross 15:09
interesting because my new book that’s coming the empathy dilemma, it talks about five pillars that I’ve seen as common threads among leaders that are both empathetic but also highly effective, right? They’re not getting burned out. They’re not giving just giving it into whatever anyone wants. And the first pillar is self awareness. The second pillar is self care. And actually the fifth pillar, which you mentioned earlier, is joy, being able to bring some levity and relaxation to the group environment enables trust to flow, enables people to calm down a little bit about everything. And so I’m seeing all these parallels in what you’re talking about, but also what you mentioned that sparked that is decisiveness is one of the pillars as well, being able to make thoughtful, intentional decisions quickly, while still synthesizing multiple points of view. And so in your work, when you’re working with folks and you’re talking about emotional intelligence, I’d love to just dig into that one a little bit, because that one always seems to feel like a mystery to people. What have you seen in terms of the most effective and emotionally intelligent leaders in their ability to make a decision that others can buy into, even if they it’s not necessarily what they wanted, and in that leader’s own confidence in that decision.
Dr. Steven Stein 16:32
So there’s a number of things that you got in there, they’ll try and so in terms of actually making a decision, that’s, I guess, the first step of what you’ve asked. So that is what we’ve looked at in decision making, is how emotions fit in with that. And again, it’s a matter of balancing your emotion with the decision. You do not want to be totally rational, because you can make a really rational decision that pisses off a lot of people, and that’s not a good thing. So you want a decision that is really the best situation for that the best decision for that situation, and that’s where you want your emotions to be balanced. You want to really look at it with a combination of rationality and emotionality. We call that wisdom. That’s what it means to be wise, right? So that’s the first part. Then your next part is, how do I sell that? So I finally decided that this is the course of action. We’re going to make cutbacks in the organization. It’s not going to be a popular decision, but this is our circumstance. So that gets into self expression. How am I going to deliver that message? So one thing I wanted, and empathy is critical, as you mentioned, critical there. Yeah, we’ve done a lot of research at that. I actually published a study looking at CEOs and looking at the profitability, comparing more profitable with less profitable. And these guys were all shot. These people were all shocked that empathy was one of the key deciders, because when you listen to people you respect the people you work with, they’re going to go all the way with you. They’re going to, you know, even in bad times, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So empathy and the other part that’s really important, because you said people kind of react negatively sometimes to empathy. That’s because they’re confusing empathy and sympathy, right? So sympathy, as I look at it, is more of an i statement, you know, Oh, I feel real sad that your husband’s not feeling well, right? Whereas empathy is more of a you statement, oh, you must be feeling really upset right now about what you’re going through. It shows that I understand what you’re feeling. It doesn’t mean I agree with everything or I’m going to give in to everything. All I want you to know is that I understand your point of view, and I know where you’re coming from Exactly.
Maria Ross 18:37
And that’s, you know, my work with the first book with the previous book, the empathy edge was about building the business case for empathy and demystifying those myths that empathy is not about being nice, it’s not about caving into demands, and it’s also not about agreeing with people. And that’s where so many people have burnt themselves out in the name of Being Well, it’s just because I’m a really empathetic leader, but what you’re doing is acquiescence. It’s not submit, it’s submission. It’s people pleasing. It’s actually not empathy, because if you don’t have decisiveness, if you don’t have clarity, if you don’t have self care, if you don’t have joy, if you don’t have self awareness, what you’re doing is likely not empathy, because otherwise you would be pulling back when you need to on the self care, and you wouldn’t necessarily be burning yourself out so you’re preaching to the choir. I love it.
Dr. Steven Stein 19:24
Yeah, we’re on the same page.
Maria Ross 19:26
I know, right? I love that. Okay, so talk a little bit. Let’s go back a little bit to this concept of hardiness, because does it ever get conflated with leaders who think hardiness means I’m always a stalwart. I’m always going to act like I have the answer. I have the right decision. That means I’m party right. Do you ever find that being conflated? Not
Dr. Steven Stein 19:51
a lot. I think it gets more conflated with grit, because grit seems to be out there a lot, and people are trying to adapt that, and we differentiate. From grit, both on the research level and conceptually, so in terms of, and I’ll sort of differentiate those grit, as you know, has become very popular, and the issue of grit is meaning I’m really determined. I’m really gonna, I’m gonna go all out. So, for example, I’m a musician. I play saxophone, and I used to think I want to be like John Coltrane or Stan Getz, and I could practice day and night month after month. I’m never going to be John Coltrane. I can, you know, and I finally realized that, and I stopped, I actually stopped playing because of that. And that’s so wrong, right? Because if I did become a musician, there’s many other things you could do than being a performer. You could be teaching music. You could be a studio musician, you could just play in a band, and so on. So you just do it for the love of it, and the love of it, which is sort of the end of my story, which I ended up doing. But the point here is that grit is just to continue pushing ahead no matter what. And the research side of that is kind of interesting. So there’s two studies that kind of look at that. One is a study of mountain climbers. The mountain climbers who had the highest grit tended to die on the hilltop because they wouldn’t give up. They were going to just keep going no matter what. And some of them ended up dying because they wouldn’t turn back when they should have and the other example of in the research side is in gambling. And if you have a lot of grit, you lose a lot of money at the roulette table, because you’re going to keep going till I win, right? And you’ll never beat the house. So that’s where hardiness differentiates. I mentioned challenge. So in challenge, I look at that situation and as a problem, and I say, Wow, I’m never going to be that famous musician, so maybe I should shift gears and do something a bit differently, right? So that’s how we differentiate hardiness from grit. And the other thing, I guess you were mentioning it meaning that I’m strong. I don’t have to whatever. I’m a stalwart, yeah, so this macho kind of thing, no, that’s not what it means at all. It means I can weather the storm and I can come out okay, or I can come out even stronger than I was before the strong, before the storm. But strong doesn’t mean again, I’m I’m this macho person. It means I can withstand the difficult situation and I can still deal with you. I can bring you along and make you stronger and and make the organization stronger. I
Maria Ross 22:21
think what I’m hearing from you, and correct me, if I’m wrong, is this idea that with hardiness, I think you mentioned it earlier, resilience is about bouncing back to our original position. Hardiness is more about kind of going through that storm, but coming out stronger at the end of it. So there’s some delta around maybe our own capacity, or our own mental state, or our own ability with hardiness? Is that an accurate statement? Very
Dr. Steven Stein 22:49
good. Yeah, excellent. All right, great. And again, it’s not something we just made up out of the blue. This has like over 20 years of research. See Paul, my co author, Paul was doing all this research in the military. So all the work he was doing was getting published in either scholarly journals or military journals. And nobody in the outside world really knew about this stuff. Yeah. So when he and I got together, I said, you know, Paul, we got to take this out into the world. I mean, people, this is great research, and people should know about it, right? So that’s why we decided to write the book hardiness together and to put it out there.
Maria Ross 23:23
So how can hardiness help make those working environments more adaptive, and what are the steps that leaders can take to practice it, to model it, to build it. What are some examples with clients you’ve worked with?
Dr. Steven Stein 23:42
Well, we have, and in the book, we outline a lot of these boring research, yeah, yeah. But, you know, we talk about what the situations are, what are the challenges that you’re undergoing? How are you dealing with those challenges now, what seems to be working and what’s not working? And then we break it down into these components, in terms of of how you look at the challenge, are your solutions, kind of emotional solutions, or are they logical solutions? And how else can we look at these solutions and we look at control in terms of implementing it. You can control the economy. You can’t control certain things out there. So what is there within your organization or yourself that you can control. What are the levers that you can pull to make a difference? And commitment is the other one we look at, where do you see yourself? Where do you see yourself going in terms of personal growth, and where do you see the organization going in terms of the organizational growth?
Maria Ross 24:35
Yeah, we I talk a lot about that in terms of both in the brand work that I’ve done, but even with this work now with empathy, is how one of the the practices of an empathetic culture is that you are actually aligned on mission and purpose and values. So you know that you’re all on the same mission and otherwise that it’s that difference, it’s that I think we’re. Going this way, you think we’re going that way that causes so much of our inability to connect? Because now I just think you’re not doing your job, or you’re not listening to me, or, you know, all the empathy goes away, because we actually, in our minds, think we’re on different missions 100% Yeah,
Dr. Steven Stein 25:17
and that’s what we frame as commitment, that what are we trying to achieve? What are our goals? And you know, in the book, we talk about how to build commitment within yourself as well as within the organization. So for example, we’ll start out with a 10 year plan. Where do you see yourself in 10 years? What would you like to be? And we have different areas. Like, how would it like to be, in terms of my career, in terms of my family, my friendships, don’t want to live in a city or in a country, like, Where do I see on all these variables? Where do I want to be? And then we sort of step back and say, Well, where do you think you want I want to be in five years? You know, what would that look like? And we bring it down to one year. And, you know, I think it’s really important that we get down to almost daily or weekly, where we have certain goals that we can say, well, I feel good today because I accomplished this little piece that adds to that bigger picture. And we learned this. You know, we did a lot of work with athletes in elite levels. Elite levels work towards those major goals, but they know it’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of work to get there, and it can be very discouraged easily, because you don’t feel like you’re moving forward, and the same with your career, right? You’re working your butt off, and you don’t feel you’re getting anywhere. You didn’t get that promotion, you didn’t get that raise. So this gives you a way to sort of look at the big picture and get through those little frustrations and and difficult times by saying, Okay, this may be bad, but this is what I’m shooting towards. I’ll put up with this for now, or I’ll try and change it this way, but I gotta keep that target in mind where I want to be.
Maria Ross 26:46
I have kind of a curveball question for you, since you’re talking about this, do you ever think I talk to a lot of leaders and a lot of experts on this show, and we always talk about the notion of goals and short term goals, long term goals? Do you ever think that we can to ourselves get to a point where the goal setting becomes detrimental, where we get paralyzed by goal setting, because it’s all we’re doing is assessing ourselves and our situation constantly?
Dr. Steven Stein 27:13
I think if they’re overly rigid goals or too narrow goals, you know, like, for example, my goal is to get psychology into the world. So that’s a pretty broad goal, right, right, right? It still guides me, you know, like when I look at doing a project or whatever, does that sort of fit or not? So I don’t feel comfortable with that, because I don’t know it looks more like anthropology or it looks more like biology, so I rule it out. So that way I keep on a fairly wide track. I mean, psychology is pretty broad, so I think you got to keep your goals fairly broad that you know that you give you flexibility. You don’t want to get locked in, and it’s not the end of the world if I go home today and say, you know, I didn’t really do anything to move forward. I mean, I’m not going to say that, because I’m on your show and I interviewed you, and we’re going to meet new people. So, you know, that’s a positive thing. I’m going to feel good tonight, but maybe tomorrow comes along and I don’t have this opportunity, I’m going to say, Well, I had it yesterday, and maybe I’m going to have it tomorrow, right? So there’s this optimistic way of framing it, so goals can be detrimental if they’re too rigid and too narrow,
Maria Ross 28:17
right? And almost unachievable in some Yeah, although, shape or form,
Dr. Steven Stein 28:22
what big hairy goal? I don’t mind that. Yeah. I don’t mind the big hairy goal, as long as you accept the fact that you know it’s going to take a while, and it’s going to be steps, and you might not get the full thing right, but you’re going to get closer to it.
Maria Ross 28:33
You’re going to get farther than you would have had you not had the goal right. Absolutely. Do you think that there’s a either or with resiliency and hardiness, or is it a both? And are they two skill sets you need to equally shore up for yourself? Well, I
Dr. Steven Stein 28:50
think there’s some overlap. Definitely overlap. Yeah. I mean, you know, some people fall apart at slightest stress, right? And that’s there’s not a lot of resilience or hardiness there. Some people are used to sort of falling down and picking themselves up and just keep going and fall down and pick themselves up. So it’s kind of repetitive. It they don’t learn from their mistakes, and that just happens the hardiness people, or if they follow the steps and build hardiness, they’re going to fall down and then pull themselves up and maybe be a bit smarter than they were before and fall down again, well, they’re going to even go up higher and be even smarter than they were before that. So we see it as kind of a continuous improvement in yourself, right?
Maria Ross 29:30
And like when you were saying that, I was thinking with hardiness, it almost sounds like you get back up again and you assess and you might do something different in the future, right? Yeah, okay. Well, this has been such a rich conversation. I know we can delve into all these little nooks and crannies, probably for hours, but I definitely want folks to check out your books, emotional intelligence for dummies and hardiness, making stress work for you to achieve your life goals. We’ll have links to all the things in the show notes for those that are exercising. They’re listening to us. What’s one best place that they can find out more about you and your work. They
Dr. Steven Stein 30:04
can come to my website, stevenstein.com,
Maria Ross 30:07
wonderful, and we will again put that link in the show notes. Thank you, Steven, so much for your insights today and for the work that you’re doing. It’s really important. Well,
Dr. Steven Stein 30:16
thanks for having me, Maria, great speaking with you, and thank
Maria Ross 30:19
you everyone for listening to another great episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate and review and share it with a friend or colleague and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Stay well and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower, use it to make your work and the world a better place. Maria here, if you’re listening to this podcast, you already believe organizations can achieve radical success through empathy. But what is the state of empathy in the workplace today. How can we understand what everyone from CEOs to HR leaders to employees are thinking and feeling about how to do their best work? My go to source has been business solvers, state of workplace empathy study Now in its ninth year, business solver provides benefits technology that transforms HR solutions into a personalized benefits journey. What could be more empathetic than that? It’s technology with heart powered by people so they know a thing or two about empathy. Learn more about the state of workplace empathy. Study for yourself and put your empathy game plan into action. Visit business solver.com/edge to download the reports and keep the conversation going. New reports coming soon include diving into the mental health statistics and d, e, i, b, go to business solver.com/edge to get the insights you need to transform your organization.
