How we think about toughness needs a reset. Too often, it’s been associated with brute forcing our way through things. Ignoring our feelings. Making an outward show of confidence and dominance.

The problem is it just doesn't work.

Performance coach and bestselling author, Steve Magness, offers another way. He’s done a deep dive on the latest research on toughness and performance. In his book, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness, he discusses the misconceptions of our current model. Then he offers a new one informed by the latest in neuroscience and psychology research. Along the way, he translates research findings into practical steps we can take to make the shift.

If you’re a performance junkie, you’ll gain a lot from this interview. You can also apply his ideas to managing your teams. If you enjoy Steve’s approach, check out my previous interview with him on finding your passion at work and in life, episode 142.

Episode Links

How to be More Resilient, According to an Elite Performance Coach

The Secret to Developing Resilient Teams and Organizations

Changing This 1 Word in Your Thoughts Can Boost Mental Toughness and Resilience, Psychologists Say

Steven Callahan

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton

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You’re days into a work project, staring at a screen, feeling anxious about your tight deadline. Mid-afternoon your phone lights up with a call from a friend. You want to connect, but you feel like you don’t have a minute to spare. You let the call go into voicemail.

On the surface, this decision may seem inconsequential. But what if you knew that a decision like this, centered on an opportunity for social connection, could make a difference in the health of your brain? Would you make time for the call?

Ben Rein is author of the book, Why Brains Needs Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection. He studies the impact of social interactions on brain health and helps us understand, at a cellular level, the biological importance of human relationships.

After listening to this interview, you may find yourself picking up the phone a whole lot more.

Episode Links

Wired for Connection, Cursed by Computers: How Social Media May Be Affecting Our Empathy

The Sci-Fi Hypothesis that Explains Why You Click with Certain People

Interview With Kasley Killam

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Digital exhaustion is real. We’re working across more apps than ever before, and since they’re always accessible, work-life boundaries have disappeared. Combine this with our personal tech, and we’ve got a recipe for burnout.

Paul Leonardi is a Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After decades of business consulting, he’s had a front-row seat to employees’ digital burnout. What he saw led him to create concrete solutions, which he outlines in his latest book, Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life.

These are smart and sensible strategies leaders can put into practice to improve employees’ quality of life – and work.

Episode Links

Developing a Digital Mindset

Are Collaboration Tools Overwhelming Your Team

Interview with Gloria Mark

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We spend a lot of our lives in groups. Whether it’s at work. With friends. Even with family. Yet we tend to focus on everyone as individuals. We rarely think about things from the group’s perspective.

Colin Fisher is an expert in organizational behavior and an associate professor at University College London, and he wants to change that. His book, The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, is his insightful attempt at sharing the latest insights on high-performing teams and how to lead them.

Episode Links

Top Six Tips for Terrific Teams

5 Secrets for Getting the Most out of Working as a Group

Interview with Keith Sawyer on groups’ collective genius

The Team

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What prevents some of us from acting on our creative ideas while others dive right in?

That’s the question creativity researcher, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, set out to answer. It’s what she writes about in her book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action.

Zorana is a senior research scientist at Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Through her work, she’s learned that creativity is a choice, and, when things get hard, we need to employ specific psychological and emotional tools to sustain our efforts. We also need to tap into strong and weak ties for support.

If you’re looking to unstick your creative capacity, this is the book you’ll want to pick up. It’s an inspiring read!

Episode Links

How We Think about Creativity Matters

Creativity is a Choice, Not a Trait

What Art Teaches Us

Interview with Moshe Bar, Episode 214, Curious Minds at Work

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Good things happen when people know they matter. Engagement and performance increase, which then motivates people to stay. In addition, they’re happier, which, makes work more enjoyable for everyone.  

But creating this kind of workplace doesn’t happen by accident. It requires that leaders consistently apply a set of specific skills focused on these outcomes. That’s why I wanted to talk to Zach Mercurio, author of the book The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance.

Zach holds a PhD in organizational learning, performance, and change. He advises leaders on practices for building cultures that promote well-being, motivation, and high performance. His previous book is The Invisible Leader.

Episode Links

Great Leaders Make People Feel Noticed

The Power of Mattering at Work

To Become a Better Leader, Change the Way You See People

Interview with Adam Galinsky on what great leaders do – author of Inspire

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When’s the last time you ran an experiment? Not as a scientist. But as a person who wants to get unstuck or try something new.

There are messages coming at us from all directions. A popular one encourages us to pursue big dreams often in service of a blanket version of success. For some, these messages are motivating. But for many others, they’re overwhelming. If, instead, we want to pursue our own path, how do we begin?

This week’s guest is Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She’s felt these cultural pressures, and it’s what’s led her to develop a different approach. She tapped into a method that lowers feelings of overwhelm and brings back the joy of discovery. And it’s a strategy that led her to write her book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

In this interview we talk about what a tiny experiment is and what it can do for us. We also discuss how to plan, run, and learn from them. I was energized by her approach.

Episode Links

The Trap of the Deadline High

Self-Authorship: The Art of Trusting Your Own Authority

Intellectual Self-Doubt: The Psychology behind Questioning Your Own Competence

Interview with Leidy Klotz (Episode 192), author of the book, Subtract

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Something happens at work – good or bad – and it brings on strong emotions. Instead of taking a moment to calm down, we’ve got to quickly shift gears and head into another meeting. We know we’ve got to manage our feelings, but the question is, how do we do that?

Ethan Kross is an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and writer who specializes in emotion regulation. He is a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan and Director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory there. In his latest book, Shift: Managing Your Emotions – So They Don’t Manage You, he shares simple, concrete ways to do this.

Episode Links

You Don’t Always Have to Process Your Emotions

Are You Overreacting?

The Expert Guide to Taking Control of Your Emotions

Interview with Michael Norton on The Ritual Effect

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A few years ago, we experienced a solar eclipse. Walking the streets of my neighborhood that day, looking through my solar eclipse glasses and sharing them with others, I felt a profound sense of awe.

And I saw that awe, that wonder, reflected in the faces of the people around me. For one or two hours, we were part of something bigger than ourselves. And that experience took us out of ourselves. It softened and connected us.

Experiences like that are what made me want to read Dacher Keltner’s book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. In this conversation, we talk about what awe is, how it works, and why it matters. We also talk about how to build more awe into our lives.

Episode Links

Here’s Why You Need to Be Cultivating Awe in Your Life

An Awe Walk

Strengthen Your Leadership with the Science of Awe

Interview with Norman Farb author of Better in Every Sense

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If you think about it, your personality impacts how you approach your life. The choices you make, the risks you take, the relationships you have. Our personalities create a set of habits, automatic reactions that impact what we think, feel, and do.

When we take on new roles, like becoming a manger or a parent, we may find that certain aspects of our personality no longer work for us. As a leader, we may need to be more extroverted, more open. As a parent, more patient, less reactive. But can we become those things? Can we change specific aspects of our personalities?

That’s the question Olga Khazan wanted to answer. She’s the author of the book, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. Through her research – numerous interviews with scientists and practitioners – as well as experiments she ran with herself on the road to becoming a parent – she learned we can. And that’s a game changer for anyone who has dreams of doing or being something different.

Related Links

Interview with Hal Hershfield

The Big 5 Personality Traits You Can Change with Practice

I’m Disagreeable – and It’s Backed by Science. Can I Change My Personality?

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In those moments when we want to disagree, why do we often stay silent? At those times when we want to opt out, why do we often just go along?

A key reason is that it’s hard to defy. It’s hard to question the way something’s always been done. To challenge comments, behaviors, and systems. Yet it’s in those moments of defiance that we flex our values and craft an identity.

That’s why I wanted to talk to Sunita Sah, organizational psychologist at Cornell University and author of the book, Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes. Her research reveals the importance of defiance and the skills we need to do it well. In her book – and in this conversation – she shares ways we can practice it and support others doing the same.

Related Links

Interview with Vanessa Patrick, author of The Power of Saying No

Speak up at Thanksgiving. Your Health Demands It.

America Thinks It’s a Country of Free Thinkers. But We’re Actually Compliant

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Making changes in our own lives is hard enough. It’s even more challenging when we need to lead our teams or organizations to do it.

That’s why I invited Dan Heath back to the podcast. Dan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Made to Stick, Switch, and The Power of Moments. This time he’s here to talk about his latest book, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working.

Dan shares powerful stories of leaders who’ve helped their teams and organizations make high-impact changes. He discusses the tools they used and leverage points they prioritized. This book takes change management to a whole other level.  

Related Links

What’s the Goal of the Goal?

Dan Heath on Innovative Problem Solving (interview)

Dan Heath on Creating Moments that Matter (interview)

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Most of us dislike networking. At its best, it’s exhausting. At its worst, it can feel inauthentic, even manipulative.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if, instead, we could focus on helping others in ways that, in the long run, benefit us, as well?

Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. She’s learned that when we use our status to sponsor others, we gain status and sponsorship for ourselves. Her findings can fundamentally change how we think – and feel - about networking.

In this conversation, I talk to Rosalind about her book, The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace. It’s an inspiring playbook for helping others – and ourselves.

Related Links

‘Sponsorship’ – Not Mentorship – Will Help You Land a Job Out of College

Interview with Alison Fragale

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At some point in every leader’s career, they’ll experience a moment of crisis. And in these moments of enormous pressure and uncertainty, a leader’s actions can mean the difference between an organization’s survival or its demise.  

Dan Dworkis is an emergency room physician and professor of emergency medicine who’s built his career on moments like this. He not only understands how to approach them, but also how to learn from them. And his book, The Emergency Mind: Wiring Your Brain for Performance under Pressure captures the wisdom he’s gained.

Related Links

Layer Cake Debriefing: A Smarter Way to Learn from Crisis

Decisions Shape Culture; Culture Shapes Decisions

Interview with Steve Magness on Real Toughness

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As you move up in leadership roles, you gain more power. Initially, you may take it in stride, thinking it’s something you earned and something you’d never let get in the way of being the manager you want to be.

But as the pressure to perform grows, the gap in power between you and your team creates blind spots that can erode these relationships.

Former Microsoft executive and Fortune 500 coach, Sabina Nawaz, experienced these challenges in her own career and, today, she coaches executives working through them. It’s why she wrote the book, You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). And in this conversation, she shares tools to help leaders manage their blind spots.

Related Links

To Make a Habit, Try Micro Habits

How to Build a Relationship between Your Employee and Your Boss

Interview with Mithu Storoni on Working Smarter

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Managing up is crucial for your success. It’s about knowing your career goals and aligning them with your manager’s needs and priorities. Yet it’s a skill we’re rarely taught and one we rarely see done well.  

For Melody Wilding, this gap in how to manage her career became clear when it caused her to lose her job. It’s what made her want to write her latest book, Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge.

In this conversation we talk about how to get aligned with your manager on what’s most important to them in ways that also help you, how to engage in effective networking, and how to promote yourself in the workplace.

Related Links

Why Managing Up is the Most Critical Career Skill in 2025

4 Signs You’re too Emotionally Invested in Your Work (and How to Fix It)

Skip-Level Meeting Success: How to Connect with Your Boss’s Boss

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On the surface, trust seems simple. You either trust someone or you don’t. That’s why I was so intrigued by Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work.

Charles is a leadership coach and trust expert. And where others view trust as binary, he sees it in four dimensions.

He describes what each dimension looks like and explains how to assess the gaps. Then he talks about how we can address those gaps in ourselves – and with others, including our managers.

I’m able to see trust in a completely different way and think you will, too.

Related Links

Interview with Michael Wenderoth

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We’re all virtual communicators. Even if we don’t work remotely, we’re texting, using social media, and making phone calls. But the question is, are we good at it? Do we know the best practices that can set us apart?

Andrew Brodsky can teach us. He’s a management professor and virtual communication expert. In this episode, we discuss his book, Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. We talk about ways to build trust, increase likability, and manage digital conflicts. He shares insights we can immediately put into action.

Related Links

Your Company is Watching You. And Probably Doing It All Wrong.

The Rules for Making a Good Impression on Zoom and Emails

No, Remote Employees Aren’t Becoming Less Engaged

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Most advice on power is about why we need it or how we can get it. And it's typically focused on things outside us, like titles or promotions.

While these external markers are important, they can leave us empty inside. 

Advice that focuses solely on external power leaves out how to build and maintain the crucial internal power we need.  That’s why Chris Lipp decided to mine the research on personal power and, ultimately, to write a book on it. In this interview we talk about his latest book, The Science of Personal Power: How to Build Confidence, Create Success, and Obtain Freedom. 

Chris’s book gives us an opportunity to build the inner foundation for success, so we can match it with external achievements. If you're looking for a book with concrete ways to center and inspire you in your work - and in your life - you'll find it here.

Related Links

Interview with Mary Anderson on Success without Stress

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Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He believes leaders are made, not born, and he’s spent decades proving it.

In this interview, we talk about his findings and how they apply to today’s leaders. We also discuss his latest book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In it, he shares three characteristics people repeatedly bring up when describing truly great leaders: they act as visionaries, exemplars, and mentors.

Adam’s written an insightful guide for current and aspiring leaders looking to take their craft to the next level.

Related Links

How to be an Inspirational Force in an Infuriating World

One Small and Powerful Thing You Can Do to be a More Inspiring Leader

Interview with leadership expert Frances Frei

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