Ellen Petry Leanse knows a thing or two about living well. She’s an executive coach, speaker, and educator. Her latest book, The Happiness Hack: How to Take Charge of Your Brain and Create More Happiness in Your Life, is all about how you can program your own well-being.
And for Ellen, well-being has always been about pushing the envelope and making the world a better place. From her time at Apple to her tenure as an instructor at Stanford – her passion for improvement has always been her driving force.
Ellen sat down in studio with The Mission’s CEO, Chad Grills to talk about her journey, the lessons she learned – and how she’s not done trying to change the world, just yet.
Be ready for change. Ellen has worked at Apple, Google, and several other Silicon Valley mainstays – but her secret to growth is that she never gets so comfortable that she forgets the needs to grow: “The amazing thing is – after all of these experiences, I’ve been trusted by the company that I work for now to really lead everything about people. And one of the most exciting and rewarding parts about that work is really encouraging people to step more fully into the talent they know they have inside. We all know heroic journey begins with this: ‘I meant for more than this.’ Now, if we look at everyone in the world with an absolute understanding that all of us are meant for more than this. But also – that the world outside is closing that in and saying, ‘No, be careful, play by the rules. You have a good thing going here, don’t risk it all over that.’ And we’re buying in to the collective myth that says, ‘Keep it simple, keep it safe.’ More and more, I feel we’re trapped in that. Lucky me, somehow I never drank that Kool-Aid.”
Remember, being “emotional” isn’t a negative thing. For Ellen, being emotional isn’t a weakness, but a strength to be harnessed. Honesty builds trust, which is an important part of the corporate setting. “You think about the dynamics – and very often, in certain workplaces, there’s a lot of competition, there isn’t radical candor, there isn’t true respect for the whole person, and there’s a lack of authenticity. When I was at Stanford teaching, I did a small research project and it was very, very simple. It said, ‘what do you fake and what do you hide in order to succeed at work?’ I asked this question of people who are in executive education type programs – the continuing studies programs and then other workshops that I was involved in. And what people would come back – even from very high level people – would be very emotional, anonymous revelations: that they faked being ahead to stay in their jobs so they could be seen at succeeding in their work. They had trouble believing in the vision or respecting their coworkers, things that are really painful to deal with. If we can extrapolate that out and say that’s what the research showed – it’s probably pretty precedent in a lot of teams. We need to ask: how do we create that sort of trust with people in our teams? And I think it does take the true leader of the company – the CEO – committing to this: you simply have to start being honest when you mess up. So one thing that we talk a lot about is a model from ‘conscious leadership’, that focuses on emotional range. We have things that we practice together to become responsive rather than reactive.”
Don’t forget the important struggles right in front of you. For Leanse, the tension between the genders is a primary focus. “The more we can see each other truly as equals, the more we understand that any barrier between ourselves and our perception of another person’s equality is largely about our own conditioning, our own blind spot, and our bias.”
Change the “five percent”.
The answer to many of our biases (and other negative knee-jerk reactions)? Being mindful, and making small changes. “I often talk about ‘five percent’ changes. And a five percent change is pretty low risk. Cognitively speaking – change nothing, and your brain will continue to do what it’s doing. So, I would say: choose something, and trust your gut five percent more. That’s a form of intelligence. I’m understanding more and more that there actually is very unique types of information that are actually processed outside of the brain. There is so much we don’t know about the brain, or the tip of the iceberg, right? But there is information that’s processed in the gut, and in the body, in the heart that is relevant and useful information. One thing I would say is, simply pay five percent more attention to your gut – your feelings.”
To hear the full interview with Ellen, go here.
