Resilience is often touted as the end all, be all of coping with life’s challenges and setbacks. But my guest knows from her studies, executive coaching, and her own life that sometimes resilience just isn’t enough. You need an even more durable source of strength.
Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and researcher and the author of Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos. Today on the show, Tasha explains why the concept of resilience rose to prominence in the 2010s, how resilience can be improved a little as a skill, but is largely an exhaustible capacity, and how you know when you’re hitting your “resilience ceiling.” We then talk about the more sustainable skillset and strength of becoming shatterproof. We discuss the potential to grow forward instead of simply bouncing back, the psychological needs that have to be met to become shatterproof, and research-backed tools for thriving in life instead of just surviving.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Tasha’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #644 — How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness
- AoM Article: On Becoming Antifragile
- Self-determination theory
- Sunday Firesides: You Don’t Have the Time, Not to Take the Time
Connect With Tasha Eurich
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Resilience is often touted as the end all be all of coping with life’s challenges and setbacks. But my guest knows from her studies, executive coaching and her own life that sometimes resilience just isn’t enough. Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and researcher and the author of “Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos.” Today on the show, Tasha explains why the concept of resilience rose to prominence in the 2010s, how resilience can be improved a little as a skill, but is largely an exhaustible capacity, and how you know when you’re hitting your resilience ceiling. We then talk about the more sustainable skill set and strength of becoming shatterproof. We discuss the potential to grow forward instead of simply bouncing back, the psychological needs that have to be met to become shatterproof and research-backed tools for thriving in life instead of just surviving. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/shatterproof.
All right. Tasha Eurich, welcome back to the show.
Tasha Eurich: Thanks for having me back, Brett.
Brett McKay: So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book Insight, which is all about self awareness and becoming more self-aware. You got a new book out called Shatterproof that makes the case that resilience sometimes isn’t enough to cope with all the chaos that life can bring. And what’s interesting is that as you started to research this book a few years ago, your life was upended by debilitating health issues. And then your research about resilience and thriving in chaos, it really started to become me-search. So what happened to your health? What was going on in your life at that time?
Tasha Eurich: So the very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of medical issues that have perplexed every specialist I’d seen. Really, really bad pain. Somebody told me I had the spine of a 70-year-old when I was 25, but a lot of things that couldn’t be stitched together. But generally what would happen is I would be resilient. Whatever weird health challenge I was facing, whether again it was pain or I would sometimes have these like full body allergic reactions even though I didn’t have allergies, I would just try to grit through it. And basically until the age of 40, I was able to keep living my life with some limitations, knowing that probably there was something that was diagnosable, but nobody knew what it was and held a pretty good life. But COVID happened. I think all of us were going and going and going, and then when we had to stop, my body was no longer fueled by adrenaline. And what happened over the course of about two years was, it started with a pain in my arms that kind of spread to basically my entire body.
Every time I’d stand up, I would be dizzy or I’d faint. My resting heart rate was 150 beats a minute. Just all of these crazy, crazy symptoms. And eventually, by about mid-2021, I was completely bedridden. I would dust myself off and go do a keynote for 24 hours and come back and pay for it for five days. And so it was really interesting about this process, as you mentioned that, I started this research in 2020 on how do people bounce back when bad things happen. This became something that was so critical for me, and I’ve never been in this situation as a researcher where I have needed an immediate answer to whatever I was investigating in order to save myself. And going back to this idea of resilience, I did all the things I was supposed to do. I put all my resilience practices. So things like gratitude and social support and optimism and trying to reframe my challenges as opportunities, I put them all in a spreadsheet. And at the point where I was like gunning the most on resilience, I would print this spreadsheet out every day and I would check the practices that I had used that day.
But I couldn’t help but notice as my physical health was deteriorating, I was more anxious, more stressed, more depressed than I had been in as long as I could remember. I was thinking to myself, this isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to me. Why can’t I crawl out of this hole? And that was what led me, and we’ll talk about it today, to discover that resilience is actually not the end all, be all solution to helping us cope with hard times. So when I wrote this book, I guess the bottom line is, I was personally experiencing the limitations of resilience while I was going through this physical spiral.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And come to find out, I mean, you ended up… You have, like a rare genetic disease, right?
Tasha Eurich: I did. And so flash forward between when I was about to give up because my resilience practices weren’t working to… Six or eight months when I started to use these shatterproof practices that I talked about, what I ended up getting diagnosed with is a genetic connective tissue disease called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or EDS. And it happens when your body actually doesn’t know how to produce the proteins of collagen and elastin. And the problem with that is those proteins exist everywhere in your body. And most physicians are told that it’s so rare that they’ll never see a case in their practice in their lifetime, but there are estimates that it’s as common as one in 5,000 people. So it’s very interesting and I feel really privileged to be able to talk about it with this platform is, some of the diseases that we think are rare might not be as rare as we think.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so you had your career the same time you were trying to figure out what was wrong with you. And that’s another added stressor. So you have to go to different specialists and you talk about in the book, you had to track your own health records because again, a lot of the doctors were like, what is this? I don’t know what’s going on. So you really had to become an advocate for yourself. And then you’re writing a book and yeah, as you said, resilience wasn’t enough. You were doing all the resilience things that people talk about. So let’s talk about resilience first and then we’ll get into Shatterproof. We’ve talked about resilience on the podcast before. We’ve actually written a series about it way back in the 2010s when resilience was hot. What do psychologists mean by resilience? And why do they become such a big thing in the 2010s?
Tasha Eurich: Yeah, that’s a really important question. Psychologists define resilience, particularly empirical scientists as the capacity to cope with hard things. And there’s some debate in the literature about this, but I think that’s kind of the commonly accepted definition. But what that means is, you sort of hear the word capacity and there’s all these practices that we can do to increase our capacity. But if it’s a capacity and not a skill set, it means that there’s a point at which we are going to exhaust that capacity. So I know we’ll come back to that, but I think that’s a really important nuance of this definition. The other way to look at resilience in kind of a more practical way is it’s a tool to keep us together during shorter term crises versus, as we’ll see, kind of a singular strategy for coping with chronic long-term stress. But I think that the reason, in my opinion, that it became so popular in the 2010s is you can sort of argue that we live in a chaos era where every day is another headline, another crisis. There’s more uncertainty than we’ve sort of ever experienced.
That era arguably began with the global recession in 2008 and 2009. And right around that time, resilience went from being this kind of esoteric scientific concept to something that really went into the mainstream. So instead of a capacity, it became a skill that anyone could develop and summon at will. Right? And so this obscure scientific concept was suddenly this empowering self-improvement tool. And there’s a lot of good that came out of that, I think. The last thing I want to do is come on today and say anything negative about resilience. But I think the problem was some people took it too far. I talk about quotes in my book that I wish I could conjure at will. But it’s stuff like resilience is the singular strategy to help us lead a better, happier life. And if you go back to the scientific research on this and including our research that we did, that’s just not empirically true.
Brett McKay: Well, I thought that was interesting. You highlight… I mean, this happens to all concepts, like psychological concepts that become popular. There’s a lot of buzz and people get excited about it. But then consequently there’s a lot of myths that pop up because people misread the research or they’re not explaining the research completely and it contradicts even what the initial resilience researchers talked about. So what misconceptions have grown up around resilience as compared to what the research actually says?
Tasha Eurich: So in my research on this, I looked at several hundred articles, but in particular the 200 most highly cited. So those are the articles that other researchers go back to and find credibility in. And the three myths that came out of this really threw me for a loop. And I’ll just say as a preface, I’m a fourth generation entrepreneur, gridding through is in my DNA. And I was shocked because again, as I said, I first found these patterns in my data, didn’t understand what that meant, where they were coming from. And then when I went back into the research, I said, oh, other people have found this, this has been true. So the first myth is, I think we all think that if we do all of these practices that it’s going to help us thrive. But what the research says is resilience is actually intended to help us survive. And I don’t know about you, Brett, but I feel like we all deserve more than just surviving. And I think, everybody that’s listening to this has their own experience of it of, like, it’s easy to feel like at the end of the day, like, I barely got through today, and then I’m going to do it again tomorrow.
So that’s the first one. The second myth is, I think, with this concept of resilience moving from a capacity to a skill, there’s a thought that, oh, I can strengthen my resilience muscle. I can dramatically improve. I can. I’m in full control of my resilience. But what the research shows is that actually some of us have more resilience than others. And all of these training programs to improve resilience have pretty spotty records in terms of whether or not they help us be more resilient. And this leads to something called gaslighting, right? Of like, well, you should have just spent more time on your yoga mat or, you didn’t do your gratitude affirmation today. And to me, I think that’s really powerful, because if it’s not under our control, in all cases, we can’t beat ourselves up for it. The third myth is, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. What we know from the research is that ongoing or extreme stress doesn’t make us stronger. In small amounts, it does. It’s called the stress inoculation hypothesis. But ongoing stress actually depletes our resilience and makes us more vulnerable to breaking. So I’m curious, how does that strike you? What’s your reaction to those myths?
Brett McKay: I mean, to me, it makes sense. I just experienced in my own life. I mean, I think resilience is useful. I think is the conclusion you make. Resilience is a useful capacity to fall back on in the short term. But then if you’re continually getting beat down, like, you just get worn down, or you’re just like, okay, I’m done, and you quit your job or you got to take a sabbatical or whatever, or even worse, you might resort to drugs or alcohol to sort of soothe the pain. That happens to a lot of people. And that one point about resilience, like, some people are more resilient than others, like, it’s just an inherent. That actually lines up. I’ve seen research. Maybe you came across this as well. A lot of times when people talk about resilience, we always talk about the Navy SEALs. Oh, the Navy SEALs. You can be resilient like a Navy SEAL, but what they found amongst Navy SEALs is that most SEALs, they, they have like, there’s like this peptide neuropeptide Y, I think is what it is, and it helps you be more resilient. I get they’ve made a connection between this peptide neuropeptide and resilience.
And SEALs have more of it for some reason, and they think it’s just like a genetic thing. And so the idea is that what the SEALs are doing with like their BUD/S training, they’re not actually trying to train people to be more resilient. It’s just like they’re trying to filter for the super resilient type. And that’s fine. I think that’s fine because, I know I probably don’t have that neuropeptide Y Navy SEAL gene and I’m never going to make the SEALs. And that’s okay. There’s other things I can do.
Tasha Eurich: Yeah, no, I think that’s a really good, that’s helpful to keep in mind. Right. Because there’s nothing wrong with us when we exhaust our capacity for resilience, particularly people who have had like early childhood trauma or who are experiencing chronic compounding stress in multiple parts of their life, which I think is living in the 21st century, frankly. Those are the things that deplete resilience. And so there’s nothing wrong with you if you, as we’ll talk about, hit your resilience ceiling.
Brett McKay: Yeah, let’s talk about this. So you talk about there’s like a resilience ceiling. How do you know when you’re reaching your resilience ceiling and what determines our resilience ceiling?
Tasha Eurich: So I think, the first thing is going back to what we were just talking about. Everybody has a different ceiling. And I wouldn’t argue that it’s set in stone because I think there is some evidence that we can improve our resilience, even if it’s just a little bit. But because our physical and mental energy are finite, resilience is something that can run out. Right. It’s an exhaustible capacity. And so when we reach that limit, it’s kind of this idea of like you’re fine until the second you’re not. When I talk to high achieving people, stressed out strivers, I call them, our fellow stressed out strivers about hitting their resilience ceiling, people talk about like, it was the smallest setback or demand or annoyance. And I just suddenly was done. I could not deal. I had a kind of embarrassing moment with scanning my manuscript about a month ago, and I had a moment where I hit my resilient ceiling. It was kind of a minor break, but it was a signal to me that I needed to pay attention.
So I think the signs are, number one, is a sense of lost mojo. You have less energy, less motivation to keep all the plates spinning. It’s kind of this, like, ugh, I don’t even care if everything falls apart. The second thing I mentioned is that little things feel big. So you’re getting unusually worked up by issues that are relatively minor, that maybe even wouldn’t normally send you over the edge. And then probably the biggest signal that I’ve personally found is when your top tools are failing. So everybody has their coping strategies, their resilience practices, but as soon as they start to feel like piling on instead of providing relief, that’s a signal you’re getting close to your ceiling. And for me, with my resilience spreadsheet, when that started feeling like another stressful thing I had to do that day, that was a signal that I needed to pay attention.
Brett McKay: So we all have a different resilience ceiling. There’s different symptoms. If you’re feeling the burnout, the lost mojo, your yoga is not working, your exercise, being outdoors is no longer helping you recharge, then you’ve probably reached your resilience ceiling. So let’s talk about Shatterproof. You argue that if we really want to make it in this world of chaos and stress, we gotta move beyond resilience. We’re not gonna give up on resilience. Again, it’s a useful tool, but we need to start thinking about becoming shatterproof. What does it mean to be shatterproof?
Tasha Eurich: So, put simply, becoming shatterproof means we proactively channel the hard things that happen not to bounce back, but to grow forward. And we do that by harnessing the cracked or broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And this is all based in our research on… We found three different reactions people had to adversity. One was, sometimes it breaks you. Two is you resiliently bounce back. And three is you become better and stronger. And what we discovered with this third group of shatterproof people was when you’re able to be strengthened by adversity, you don’t try to pretend and power through or deny that you’re cracking or deny that you’re struggling. Instead, you use that as a source of insight, of motivation and to pivot to align your life more closely to the life that you want to live. And it was really inspiring to sort of hear some of these stories, big and small, where people were experiencing really tough things and said honestly and genuinely, that brought me closer to my loved ones. It brought me a new source of strength or meaning. It brought me peace, purpose, joy in the worst things that were happening. So I think it’s, if we can all become 25% more shatterproof, I think not only would we all be a lot happier, I think the world would be a better place.
Brett McKay: Yeah. It reminded me, as I was reading about Shatterproof, of Nassim Taleb’s idea of becoming antifragile, where it’s like, you’re not just resilient, the chaos actually makes you stronger. And he kind of talks about it in sort of economic ways. And I think with Shatter, what you do with your book is like, how can you apply this on the personal level? And you talk about one of the things you have to do if you want to start becoming shatterproof is there’s some mindset shifts you got to make happen in your head, to become that. So what are some of those mindset shifts we got to make to become shatterproof?
Tasha Eurich: So there are three big ones. The first is, and this is, they all involve deprogramming for stressed out strivers, in my experience. The first is we have to move from kind of ignoring or pushing through when things get hard, to proactively embracing them and not celebrating them, not platitudes about, oh, there’s an opportunity in this crisis, but truly saying, okay, you know, chaos is swirling around me, it’s starting to break me. How can I channel this to come out on the other side a little bit better for it? The second is kind of moving from the capacity to cope, of like, I just need to keep filling up my resilience reserves to the courage to reinvent ourselves. I think there’s a difference between sort of waiting for things to get better and proactively saying, this situation may or may not change, but I am going to make sure that I change in a positive and proactive way. And then the third is, I think it kind of sums this up, but it’s from bouncing back to growing forward to use these situations as fodder for growth.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that second one can be hard because it’s so easy to get stuck in inertia and kind of stick with the devil. It’s like, well, I’ve always done this. If I make this change, it might not work out. It could be worse. So I’ll just stick with muddling along.
Tasha Eurich: Right. I have this horrible job and my choices are either keep doing what I’m doing with no changes or get a new job and I’m too tired to get a new job. Right. And I think so many of us are just involved in daily firefighting that it feels like that’s all we can do. But what I’ve discovered about this framework, this the Shatterproof roadmap that we’re going to talk about is it takes the same amount of time as white knuckling through it. You know, it does take the awareness to step back and say, okay, I need to pay attention here, but it’s not any more time consuming than the misery of gridding through those situations.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s do some recap here. Resilience is a certain skill set that can help us bounce back in the face of short term adversity, but it functions more like a limited resource that can be depleted when we’re facing ongoing or extreme stress. Being Shatterproof gives you a second skill set that it not only works for dealing with the current challenge, but then it prepares you for your future ones as well. And I also, I think it’s more sustainable. It’s more like a lifestyle that it’s not something you just summon up during a crisis, it’s something you’re doing all the time. And rather than depleting resources, being shatterproof actually generates energy and renewal through the process of transformation. So you don’t just bounce back, you bounce back stronger. You’re to come out better. So let’s get into this. Let’s learn how to be more shatterproof. And you’ve got some research-backed tools to help you do this. And the first one you talk about is to probe your pain. What do you mean by probing your pain?
Tasha Eurich: What we discovered about shatterproof people is they didn’t see their pain as a personal failure. They saw it as a signal to pay attention and specifically a chance to challenge their preconceptions, a way to kind of guide them to new ways to meeting their needs. Because the alternative, you’re pushing through it by denying it exists. And if you’re denying it exists, a couple things happen. Number one is you get what’s called negativity, rebounds, which are when we try to suppress our negative emotions, we are worse off in the long run. And then the second thing is it robs us of the insight that we could get by saying, okay, what’s going on here? Like, this thing is really disproportionately affecting me. I wonder what that’s about. And so it’s kind of… Probing pain is a curious way of examining what’s going on with us in our tough moments.
Brett McKay: And so you’re not wallowing in it, you’re not ruminating in it. You’re not saying, oh, why me? It’s just like, okay, what’s going on? If pain is a signal for something, what is it trying to tell me?
Tasha Eurich: Right. Biologically, pain is a signal that something is wrong. And I got that signal pretty clearly, physically, during my illness, but I also had that signal emotionally and mentally. And I spent a really long time, I spent months and months and months just ignoring it and saying, surely tomorrow will be better, but just hope alone. And as a good friend of mine says, hope is not a plan.
Brett McKay: Hope is not a plan. Yeah. And so it’s not just physical pain. In your case, there was physical pain with your health issues you had. That was definitely there. But this, you’re talking pain could be like existential pain. Kierkegaard talks about this. He’s one of my favorite philosophers. People listen to podcasts.
Tasha Eurich: I love him too.
Brett McKay: They know I love Kierkegaard, but he talked about anxiety. And for him, anxiety wasn’t like, oh, I’m nervous. It’s more like it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you’re laying in bed at night looking to the ceilings like, oh, geez, what is going my life? Something’s not right here. He said, you got to listen to that.
Tasha Eurich: Existential dread.
Brett McKay: Yeah, existential dread. He said, you got to listen to that because it’s telling you need to do something. So, if a guy listening to this podcast is feeling that… Probing your pain means, okay, what is this trying to tell me? What’s going on here?
Tasha Eurich: Right. And by the way, anyone who is a fellow existentialist with you and I might notice a lot of those themes show up in this work as well. So I love that connection.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you probe your pain, trying to figure out, what is it trying to tell me? Maybe my job is terrible. Maybe I need to move, get out of my hometown where I’m at. Maybe that’s what it is. Then you talk about how you can use Self-Determination Theory to start helping you formulate a plan for yourself to become more shatterproof. For those who aren’t familiar with Self-Determination Theory, I’m a big fan of this theory. What is it and how can it help you become more shatterproof?
Tasha Eurich: Self-Determination Theory is the coolest theory in psychology that no one knows about. And I love that you’re familiar with it because part of my mission with this book is to really bring it out maybe into the mainstream a little bit more. But it’s a theory that explains what brings out the best in us and what brings out the beast. And those are not my words. Those are Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s words. And that’s kind of this idea of, what are the things that have to happen for us to live a beautiful life, for our fundamental needs to be fulfilled? And then what happens to us, when we become that worst version of ourselves, when those needs are being actively thwarted or frustrated. And Self-Determination Theory outlines three fundamental biologically programmed psychological needs that all humans have. And the idea is, if these needs are being met, we’re the best version of ourselves. If they’re being frustrated, we become the worst. And if they’re sort of just not there, then it’s somewhere in between of just like a motivation.
But the needs are so confidence, which is a sense that we are doing well and we’re growing. The second is choice, which is feeling like we have agency and authenticity. And the third is connection, which is really just a sense of kind of belonging, a sense that we have mutually supportive relationships and all three matter, and all three are important for not just being the best version of ourselves, but enjoying and really finding meaning in this ride we call life.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s called Self-Determination Theory because it’s the idea that when people have their psychological needs met, they have an innate ability to self-determine their actions and behaviors. So when your needs are met, you’re able to run on intrinsic motivation instead of just extrinsic motivation. So you’re able to direct your life in a self-driven way. And those needs are, as you said, confidence or that it’s competence. Choice, that’s agency. You can also say autonomy there. And then feeling connected to others. So how does Self-Determination Theory line up with becoming shatterproof?
Tasha Eurich: Yeah, so I think fundamentally, if I had to explain, like how do you become shatterproof? It’s about pivoting in the way that you can, under the constraints that you have, to design a life where you’re getting more of those needs met. And it can be kind of a situation by situation thing where if you probe your pain, you say, wow, I’m feeling like incredibly alone and incredibly disconnected. What can I do to restore that sense of connection? Or it can just be sort of generally in life, like, how… Am I making decisions overall in the long term for myself that’s supportive of those needs? Or am I living a life of mustivation, right, Where I’m not actually acting in the interest of my own needs. I’m sort of just trying to be everything to everyone and probably failing at that because no one can do that successfully in my experience. So I think that’s the heart of becoming shatterproof are the insights and guidance from Self-Determination Theory.
Brett McKay: And something you talk about is that sometimes or oftentimes when people are feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, burned out, I think people intuitively know that, okay, I need more. Maybe I need more choice, more autonomy, or maybe I’m just feeling down and need more confidence. But then you say, sometimes what we do, instead of doing things that will actually give us those things, we start chasing shadow goals. What are shadow goals?
Tasha Eurich: Shadow goals are quick fixes for finding self-worth, power or approval. And you see the difference. So the difference between confidence and self-worth, the difference between choice and power, the difference between connection and approval. What’s really interesting is if we can’t sort of get these more intrinsic needs met, we start to look for substitutes for them. So for example, if our confidence is being thwarted, let’s say your boss at work just gave you a negative performance review, we might fall into behaviors that not even consciously where we think we’re trying to get that thing that’s being frustrated, but it’s actually taking us further away from it. So we might start to pursue achievement at all costs, or we might become a perfectionist, or we might start just avoiding all situations that make us feel incompetent. And sort of the classic example. You think about what it’s like to be a young person today, maybe you’re in high school and the friend clique that you’re a part of, doesn’t want you to be a part of it anymore. And so you decide you’re going to become TikTok famous, right? Where that true human connection that met your needs, it’s been taken away from you, but you substitute it with something that will not actually fulfill that need, right? Becoming TikTok famous. There’s a lot of reasons somebody might do that, but it’s not going to necessarily fulfill our need for connection.
Brett McKay: Yeah, a lot of people avoid things like that’s a common tactic. Well, let’s pretend like it’s not happening.
Tasha Eurich: Right.
Brett McKay: Or I’ll just downplay, oh, it’s not that big of a deal. Or they’ll do the escape thing. Well, I’ll just go on lots of vacations even though the problem never goes away.
Tasha Eurich: Agree. Yeah, I think that’s a great example.
Brett McKay: And I think too, I think resilience tools can also become shadow goals or shadow habits. Because these tools, they do give you a sense of autonomy. It’s like, well, I do have control. I can meditate, I can exercise, I can go outside and spend time in nature. And all those things are good, but then they don’t really solve the main problem. It gives you like a sense you have autonomy, what you do because you chose those things. But it’s not actually solving the underlying problem that’s causing the stress.
Tasha Eurich: That’s it. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s not a fix.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So how do we figure out if we’re chasing shadow goals?
Tasha Eurich: So I think a question that I think can be helpful is, I call it a shadow spotting question. How is my current behavior different from when I’m at my best? So for me, with my illness, when I was holed up in bed and eating and drinking myself into oblivion because I had reached my resilience ceiling and I just couldn’t anymore, I asked myself that question. And the answer was, I mean, it was stunning to me because I was doing what you said I was avoiding. And I’m somebody who makes a living wrestling the personalities of CEOs, right? I didn’t get my nickname The Velvet Hammer for nothing. My favorite nickname from my clients. But yet here I was, shuffling from doctor to doctor, just doing what they told me, not taking any agency, not being the CEO of my own medical journey. And that question really helped me understand, okay, this is not the best version of me. I mean, clearly. But then it also starts to get you into, okay, what would the best version of me be doing in this situation? And as I started to examine that, I said, there is no cavalry coming to save me. If I go on like this… At the time, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I was going to not be here anymore. So I said, if nobody’s going to save my life, I need to save my life. And that was when I shifted from a resilient journey, I think, to a shatterproof one.
Brett McKay: So something you talk about is that instead of having shadow goals, we should develop shatterproof goals. What does a shatterproof goal look like?
Tasha Eurich: So this is really cool. So once I figured out that Self-Determination Theory and our three fundamental human needs were at the heart of being shatterproof and building our best life, all I had to do was go into the scientific research and find every goal that has been shown to fulfill those needs. So the Shatterproof six are kind of an organizing framework for the types of goals that if we pivot away from our shadow goals, right, for me it was sort of escaping or going along to get along, towards these goals, then we are automatically going to be in a mindset where we’re fulfilling our own needs. So just some examples. I’ll give you the Shatterproof six and then maybe a couple of goals that might be under it. So we might decide to rise to make ourselves better. We can do that through mastery, focusing on learning something or relearning a skill. We can do it through self-development where we commit to personal growth and we expand our horizons. Others might be, I want to flourish, I want to make my life better, I want to enjoy this experience of living on the earth.
And we might decide we’re going to try to rediscover, like my love of the game, immersing myself in things that I like to do. For me to flourish, I had to focus on my health. I had to focus on maximizing my mental and physical health. So that’s confidence, that’s choice. Right. So rising is confidence, flourishing is choice. Or another example is we might want to relate, we want to maybe make meaningful connections. So things like that might be finding belonging, building positive social bonds. We might try to deepen a close relationship that we have. A controversial but really science-backed example of relating is forgiveness, letting go of old grudges for our own needs and our own well-being. And so this is kind of like a menu. If you want to be shatterproof, you can go through the whole process. But the other thing you can do is say which of these things is going to help me sort of deepen something that, that I’m missing the most right now.
Brett McKay: I want to dig deeper, drill deeper into some of these tools that you’ve uncovered with your research. Let’s talk about that confidence aspect of Self-Determination Theory. What are some research-backed tools that you’ve uncovered to help you increase your confidence when things are spiraling out of control? I’m sure a lot of people experience this like their job is in turmoil. Maybe their home life is, marriage is bad. Maybe the kids are doing something that’s just causing a lot of stress in their life. And they just feel like, I can’t do anything, I’m incompetent. What can people do to feel more confident? But actually, like, it’s not like a fake confidence where it’s like, oh, hey, I got this. And you’re, you actually, you’re just trying to convince yourself. How can people increase their actual confidence?
Tasha Eurich: So let me give you two tools that I really like, that I use with my clients and frankly, personally. One of them is kind of how you measure success and competence. And then the other is getting some data to maybe give you a clearer picture of your strengths. So let me start with the second one. It’s called the Reflected Best Self Exercise, and it’s been insanely supported by research in terms of all of the benefits that this can give us. And it’s all the stuff we’ve been talking about. But essentially what it boils down to is you pick 10 to 20 people from as many different parts of your life as possible. You want to get a super wide range. And you send them each an email and you say, whatever preface you want to give, ask them for two to four examples of when they’ve seen you at your best. And a lot of people say, oh my God, I can’t ask my family and friends that. They don’t have time. I think what you’ll discover if you try it, if you take a leap and try it, is that they will be thrilled to help you.
It’s such a positive, positive, feel-good experience for everybody. So the responses start rolling in. You start to look for themes. What are the things that I’m hearing over and over and over and what strengths do those point to? And then the third step is you basically sit back and you write a portrait of you at your best. When I am at my best, I am. I was talking to a CEO today that I coached about two years ago, who I actually feature in this chapter in the book. I was talking to her about an hour ago and she told me that she has her feedback report, which is kind of a version of this, where I get, I interview everybody that they work with and all their friends and family and say, here’s a picture of you. But she said, I read the positive comments more often than you think. And to your point, this isn’t an ego boost. This isn’t a feel-good woo-woo exercise. Like, come on, nobody needs that. What this is is a chance to see yourself through other people’s eyes when you’re struggling to find a sense of self-worth. Because especially when lots of people see these strengths, it’s kind of hard to deny that they exist. So that’s the first piece is really kind of feeding that need.
The second thing is mindfully paying attention to your standard. So a lot of times people who struggle with confidence are perfectionists. Right. That’s a shadow response to thwarted confidence. And so I talk about a tool called the 10% buffer. It’s really simple. And by the way, it doesn’t work if you are an air traffic controller, a surgeon, an accountant, like in the technical aspects of your job. But it can still work in your life. Whenever possible, give yourself permission to be excellent only 90% of the time. And what’s behind that is almost no one expects perfection from other people nowadays. Right. We’re all just getting by. So, like pretty good, even like great. Like 90 out of 100 is an A minus. And people have lots and lots of data on how you show up, such that the difference between 90 and 100 might be one mistake. What happens if you make a mistake? The world doesn’t end. Right. People have other data and you have other data to assess sort of how you’re showing up and your worth and your value. So those would be the two tools I’d start with.
Brett McKay: I like that first one you talked about because I think maybe you’ve probably seen this with other stressed out achievers. You’re so freaking hard on yourself. And when you’re going through a hard time, you just feel like, man, I am a loser, I can’t do anything right. But then you completely discount or just overlook all the good stuff you’ve done, the success you’ve had. I think it’s a really great practice of bringing those, the good things that you’ve done to the forefront of your mind. Like, oh, yeah, I have done hard things in the past. I can do this again.
Tasha Eurich: Right.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’m gonna have to do that because I’d sometimes get down on myself like that. Okay, so those are things we can do to increase our confidence during a period of a lot of stress and overwhelm. Let’s talk about that shrinking sense of agency that we can have when we’re going through a hard time. Now, I imagine you experienced that firsthand with your health Issues because you kind of felt like you’re beholden to insurance companies and doctors. But everyone has felt this where they’re going through a hard time, and it’s like, well, it’s the economy, it’s corporate shakeups. Just these things. They feel like they don’t have any control. So what can people do to start taking back a little bit more control during a difficult situation? But not in a way where it becomes like a shadow goal where you kind of like faking yourself that you have more control than you do. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. You’re not just like, oh, I’m just meditating. I can do that. Well, that’s great. But is it actually helping you solve your problem?
Tasha Eurich: Yeah, I think that’s a really important distinction you make. And I think the difference between sort of false choice and true choice is, does it fulfill our need or is it just like window dressing? Right. Is it just trying to convince ourselves that we have it? So a couple things. The first is, we all are constrained by so many things. I always make this joke, like, the employees in an organization are constrained by their supervisors, like, all these people, all I do is what they want. The supervisors are constrained by middle managers. Middle managers are constrained by executives. Executives are constrained by the CEO. The CEO is constrained by the board. The board is constrained by shareholders. So on and on it goes. Almost no one feels a complete sense of agency in their lives.
So the question becomes, what is it that’s within my control that I can start to take choice back? So, an authenticity check question, like, am I doing this because I want to or because I have to? If it’s something that I have a choice over. It’s really simple. How do I feel about doing this? Do I feel like positively, or do I feel… Am I dreading it? Am I feeling like I want to put it off? Am I feeling like it’s just an obligation, or I’m doing it to make someone else happy? Those types of small questions throughout our day can help us make micro choices more in the spirit of our best interest. Because what’s been shown, particularly with choice, is just taking a small moment and exercising agency and authenticity and kind of what we really need boosts our choice overall. So you might even think of it like, I can’t control what my boss is asking of me necessarily. I can influence it. But I can control all of those little choices I’m making every day. So I think the authenticity check is important. Do you want to talk about the 2-2-2 method now?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that. That was a cool, cool one that I really liked and resonated with.
Tasha Eurich: I like this one, too. I actually came to it out of desperation. Since we’re talking about my health journey, early on in the process, I managed to talk myself into a clinic that diagnoses EDS, because by that time, I knew what I had, because I was dedicating 30 minutes a day to reading all the rare disease research, and I thought this was going to be my ticket. I thought I was going to come in, they were going to take one look at me and say, ah, EDS. But unfortunately, I left with a, what doctors call garbage can diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And they ignored a lot of objective signs of EDS which was unfortunate. And I remember leaving the clinic and walking back to my hotel room that day and just feeling like this is the lowest I have ever been in this journey. I’m trying to be shatterproof, but I just don’t even know what to do at this point.
And so the tool that I’d been developing at the time is this idea that in the moments where we are struggling, particularly if we’ve been shatterproof and we face a setback, is to pause and ask ourself, what do I need in the next two minutes, two hours and two days to get my fighting spirit back. And the idea here is it’s an act of confidence, of saying, like, I know what I need. It’s an act of choice. It’s saying, I am going to take 48 hours for me, and it’s an active connection with ourselves, right? And saying, like, what is it that I truly need? So, two minutes is immediate psychological first aid. I got into my hotel room, I went under the covers, and I started taking deep breaths, just taking deep breaths and just trying to center myself, feeling the ground beneath my feet, feeling the sheets on my legs.
And then two hours is what’s a small thing that I can do to make me feel a little bit better. So I realized I needed Thai takeout, so I got Thai takeout. And I didn’t just eat it while I was working. I actually let myself have a meal and enjoy it and take a minute. And then in the next 48 hours, two days, I think this is the most important one. It’s giving yourself permission to not agonize or troubleshoot or solve this problem, because nothing… I didn’t need to figure out my next move immediately. Every once in a while, we need an immediate response to something like this, and that’s okay. But just saying I’m going to give up for two days. I’m going to give up trying to save my own life, and I’m going to come back to it on day three. It’s pretty amazing. I use this tool more often than I wish I had to. But it’s pretty amazing how powerful it is in getting us back on track.
Brett McKay: No, I think it’s a good one. That’s something I struggle with when I’m feeling overwhelmed. My tendency is just to power through it. And I just tell myself, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to take a break. But my wife’s like, you need to go sit in the sauna. Go take a nap. She has all these suggestions of things to do. I’m like, I don’t have the time to do that. And she’s like, you don’t have the time to not take the time.
Tasha Eurich: Your wife is very smart.
Brett McKay: Cause, what ends up happening is when I try to power through it, it just makes things worse and I just crash out even worse than if I just taken an hour to take a nap or something. So, yeah, I like that. The 2-2-2 rule. So what can you do in two minutes, two hours, two days? So that can help you increase your sense of agency. Let’s talk about connection. What can we do to increase the amount of connection in our life when we’re going through a really hard time?
Tasha Eurich: I think the first thing to know is what fuels our connection. And there’s two things that researchers have found. So the first is belonging. And this comes from frequent positive social interactions that can be everything from like, somebody at the grocery store to our soulmate in life. Right. And everything in between. So I think the first thing about building connection is, especially in the world that we live in, where it’s just so much easier to stay home in your pajamas and order it from Amazon than go out and do things in the world or doordash. Right. Even if I don’t feel like it, am I making sure that I’m getting those sort of common, frequent positive interactions, like, go run some errands. Right. Most people in the world are good. You might have one annoying thing happen to you. But I don’t know, especially lately, I feel like the world is so hard. You can find a lot of positive interactions in just the everyday kindness of other people.
The second component of connection is relationship depth. And this thrives on trust and vulnerability and giving and getting support. What’s interesting about relationship depth is it has to be a two-way street. There’s been research that’s shown that when we’re giving more than we get to a relationship or getting more than we give, it doesn’t fulfill our connection need. So that’s one way to think about it is like equalizing my relationships. I’ll give an example. I’ve been in my book hole. I spent five years writing this book pushing off my poor friends and family who have been more understanding than I ever could be, I think. To say, like, okay, now that I have a little bit of time and space and the book is done, how can I give back to all of these people who have been so generous and understanding with me? That’s an example of sort of balancing the scales a little bit.
But another piece of this just to sort of move away from those two building blocks more generally is to pay attention during the toughest times in your life, who shows up for you and who is unwilling and unable to. This is something I learned from a CEO I worked with a couple years ago. He calls it backers and barnacles. So backers are those people who show up and stick by our side, however imperfectly. And barnacles are the ones who act just the same during good times. They’re really hard to distinguish. But when things are tough and you really need somebody to show up for you, they’re simply unwilling or unable. It’s unfortunate that tough times can be that like relationship litmus test, but I think it’s one of the most powerful ways to figure out who our people really are. And you’re probably not surprised. I found out during the period of my illness who those backers were. And by doing that I was able to shed the barnacles and give that sort of precious time and energy to the people that are backers.
Brett McKay: Okay, I love this. We’ve got some great tools that people can start using today to increase their sense of self-determination. I’m curious. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? This is… We just really scratched the surface with this stuff.
Tasha Eurich: We did. Well and I just want to tell you, you have taken us through this entire book, which is so exciting. But yeah, we have only scratched the surface. So if people want to learn more, you can go to shatterproof-book.com and there’s actually one tool that we’re launching with the launch of this book. It’s a free five minute assessment of how close you’re at to your resilience ceiling. We’re just finishing it now. It’s I think it’s going to be really, really cool. So you find out by the five dimensions of your resilience ceiling and you get a couple of really practical tools that you can start doing right away to restore and renew those reserves.
Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Tasha Eurich, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Tasha Eurich: Always great to talk to you and thank you so much for this, Brett.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Tasha Eurich. She’s the author of the book Shatterproof. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, tashaeurich.com. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/shatterproof where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. Sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
