Nick Petrie on Why High Performers Burn Out And How To Stop It

Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Contra Minds. In this episode, I’m talking to Nick Pittering. Nick is a researcher and speaker on leadership, resilience, and burnout prevention. Nick helps organizations prepare for the future by creating solutions that help leaders be more adaptable, resilient, and strategic. His clients include Google, Salesforce, Walmart, Home Depot, Wells Fargo, NASA, Kellogg’s, and Comcast to name a few. He has worked globally across industries, including engineering, tech, banking, pharma, energy, law, retail, and television. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard University and is the co-author of the book, Work Without Stress, Building Resilience for Long-Term Success.

I spoke to Nick about his new book, Burn Bright, where we spoke on a range of topics like the three degrees of burn, pulsing and discovering the opposite world to manage stress and burnout amongst many others. It was a very interesting and engaging conversation and I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to this. Over to my conversation with Nick.

Q1

ContraMinds Podcast (00:22.599)

Nick, I know you are just going to be publishing a book called Burn Bright and I did get to read about some of your articles from MIT Sloan Review that’s really where I got interested about your work and the research that you do. One of the things that I wanted to kick off this conversation with is really what made you research about

ContraMinds Podcast (00:50.961)

burnout and why do you think it’s important in the context of the work that people do?

Nick Petrie (00:57.59)

Hmm. Right. Well, I mean, the long answer is… a long time ago, I got very interested in stress. I got cancer in my 20s and then it came back a second time and then a third time and it was quite serious and there was no treatment for it. And so I got I found that experience so stressful and overwhelming. And at that time, I learned a whole lot from a British academic – Dr. Derek Roger, who’d been studying for 30 years. Why, when you put two people in the same situation, one might get stressed and one doesn’t. And he taught me a lot of things and it really helped me reduce my stress. And even though the cancer came back three times, but I didn’t get so stressed each time. And so I got very curious about how people respond to the events which happened to them in their lives. Cause a lot of the events we really can’t avoid.

And then sort of the burnout. So I knew a lot about stress, but then when COVID happened, what I started to notice was people weren’t just stressed and ruminating. They were also exhausted. And when I looked at what was happening, I just noticed when people are under threat, particularly in the workplace, they respond by doing more. Their responses to work longer, work harder, stop taking breaks, stop their exercise, stop any of that sort of thing and just try and deliver. And the tricky thing about that is in the short term it works. Like you actually get a lot done, but it’s not sustainable. And people just started burning out more and more. And I saw that in my clients around the world and I noticed the solutions they were offering weren’t working. They were doing a lot of wellness solutions and you you should, you know, eat this way and sleep this way and meditation apps and all of the things were good. But the problem was people would then go back to work and that was where a lot of their problems were. What I really wanted to do was research this topic, what’s really going on and what practical solutions can we find for people who are just in an “always-on” world and an “always-on” workplace.

ContraMinds Podcast (03:11.879)

Mm-hmm.

ContraMinds Podcast (03:22.651)

That’s really great. 

Q2

I’m going to, you know, as I reading the book, Nick, I really picked on one sentence which was very, very, you know, interesting to me. And I want to explain it a little bit more, go a little more deep. I’m going to read it out.

ContraMinds Podcast (03:42.44)

You’ve written saying hardware of our ancestors is something that we still carry but environment around us has changed or is more dynamic, right? So what does that do to stress and burnout?

Nick Petrie (04:01.998)

Right. Yeah. So that is one of the major challenges for a long time. The environment didn’t change that much. You know, it changed very, very slowly and our fight and flight systems were well adapted to handle it. We would respond to a threat and we’d get a whole lot of adrenaline and cortisol and we could deal with it. But then the threat would go away and we would relax and recover.

And what has happened so quickly and particularly, I’d say the last 15 years and you might even argue the last 18 months is things have sped up. It is an always-on world. Boundaries have collapsed. An executive at one of the Silicon Valley companies said to me, he said, work is like a gas that will expand to fill all spaces. And that…

ContraMinds Podcast (04:39.035)

Yeah.

Nick Petrie (04:58.338)

That’s exactly right. know, work, can just fill up all of your life if you want it to. And our human physiology, when it feels like there is anticipation that something must be done now, it will give you all the adrenaline and cortisol you need, but it’s only supposed to be in short doses. But currently, our physiology is just constantly being triggered on, And that’s why a lot of people are not sleeping well. They’re not recovering properly. And one of the biggest challenges we saw is people couldn’t switch their brains off at the end of the day when they went home. So they stayed in this on fight or flight mode.

Q3

So talk to me a little bit about the switch on and switch off and how does the brain prepare for this? And if I were listening to this, you know, if I was listening to this Contra Minds podcast, how do I switch on and switch off? It’s so hard.

Nick Petrie (05:51.067)

no,

ContraMinds Podcast (06:12.457)

because it’s great to read about it but so difficult to practice.

Yeah, it is. is. And so what we did is we studied a lot of people. We ended up calling them the thrivers who had low stress, but they were high performance. And we wanted to know what are their strategies or tactics. 

So I’ll give you one example. We learned from an executive at one of the top companies in the US, a technology company. And he said…. this work environment he’s in is very, very intense. Anyone who survives for three years is considered a veteran. 

I was like, oh, it’s tough. Three years. How long have been here? And he said a decade. And I said, well, how, how did you last so long without burning out? 

He said, I did burn out, but then I learned new methods and started applying them. And I said, okay, what were they? And he gave me two really good ones. 

The first one was called the 111 mechanism.

ContraMinds Podcast (07:16.551)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petrie (07:16.59)

And this was the idea that he would never usually take breaks and he just couldn’t get himself to take holidays or vacations because there was so much on. And then he burned out, but he realized he was good at following his calendar. 

So one of the things he did is…

…at the start of the year, he booked in his one-one-one mechanism was every once a year, he booked in one long vacation. 

Once a quarter, he booked in one short vacation. 

And once a month, he booked in one day off.

And he combined these with public holidays and weekends and things like this, it’ll fit. But for the first time in his crease, he would switch off and take vacations and breaks. And I was like, okay. And that was such a simple one that many people have now tried, the one-one-one mechanism. 

And I said, that’s good. He said, but the most important change I made to switch my mind off, and he paused for a moment and he said was dancing.

ContraMinds Podcast (08:13.936)

Mmm.

Nick Petrie (08:14.862)

dancing. He said, yes, Argentinian tango to be precise. was like, what? This is not what I expected from this executive in this technology company. He said, and it was exactly what you were saying, Swami. He said, I used to go home and my brain would not switch off. And he said, until I tried Argentinian tango and I discovered it is the opposite of my work world. He said, in Argentinian tango, you must be in your heart and you must be in your body – two places I really am at work. 

And he said the currency in Argentinian tango is the opposite. He said no one cares how much money you make, what your job title is, who you work for, the only thing that matters, the only currency is can you dance? So he says, I go along in the evenings, I’m with this community, I’m in my heart, I’m in my body, I’m sweating, I’m moving, the music’s going and he says I am completely present with what is going on and my work world disappears. And he said, it is like as my opposite world. I say, well, I’ve never heard that phrase. We kept interviewing people over and over again. We found that people who are good at switching off often had opposite worlds. And this, that completely engaged them, made them present and their work world disappears. 

So we know it. 

We now ask people do you have an opposite world and what happens when you engage in it? And some people say no. Some people go, yes, I do. I didn’t realize. And they start to realize that was very important. Many people say yes, but I never do it anymore because I’m too busy. So one, one, one and opposite worlds with two methods we found very effective for helping people switch off.

Q4

ContraMinds Podcast (10:07.687)

Nick, when you look at this concept of burnout, you write about burnout…you know, the three degree of burns, right? And people really don’t understand, am I burnt out? You know, can I refresh and come back? And I thought what you wrote about the three degree of burns was very interesting. And so can you talk to me a little bit about what are the three degree of burns and how can I understand them a little better?

Nick Petrie (10:47.158)

Yes, yes, certainly. Yeah, that’s a popular one that people have grabbed onto. When I mean, everything I had read about burnout and heard about burnout, it was sort of like an event, like you are burned out. And if you’re not burned out, you go, well, I must be okay. So I’ll just keep working my normal way. 

But when we actually examine people, we found that it was more like degrees of burn like skin burn, can get first degree skin burn, second degree, third degree. That was closer to what people experience. 

So first degree burn was like a stressor or some acute stress. You’re feeling stressed at the moment. You might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed, but it’s temporary. Like once the event or you get this project out the way, then you feel fine. And if you take a rest and take a break, you go back to your equilibrium.

ContraMinds Podcast (11:33.084)

Mm.

Nick Petrie (11:41.794)

That’s first degree burn. 

Second degree burn, it starts to become chronic. Like your physiology is switched on all the time. You feel stressed. Your body is tense, but it almost feels normal because this is what you’re like all the time. And even if you take a break, it doesn’t necessarily bring it down. The stress has become chronic. What we noticed when people got to that, if they kept pushing, which many driven achieving or high work ethic people will push through no matter what, you can go down to third degree burn and this is the full blown burnout.

At this point, your body will start to shut you down. So your mind might be saying keep going, keep going, but your body will withhold resources and people couldn’t write a letter. They couldn’t book a plane ticket. They couldn’t get out of bed. People were bursting into tears at the office without knowing why. And the biggest thing to watch for is just absolute exhaustion. This is third degree burn. 

So the reason that’s useful is because you want to monitor your degrees of burn and the solutions for each degree of burn are different. 

So if you’ve got third degree burn and your company says, here’s a meditation app, just do this, it’s not enough.

ContraMinds Podcast (12:52.251)

Yeah.

Nick Petrie (13:06.636)

and people felt like they are getting gas lit. Meditation is great, but just giving someone that and say, will take care of it or take half a day off. That is the wrong, it’s a good solution, but for the wrong level of burn. So when it’s serious, you need serious solutions.

ContraMinds Podcast (13:21.583)

Mm-hmm.

ContraMinds Podcast (13:25.991)

Beautiful, beautiful. I really love this idea of monitoring the burn, right? That’s a lovely, lovely point that you make, Nick. 

Q5

So some of the solutions that you talk about and the 10 principles that I read in the book were very interesting and one thing that caught my attention was this concept of pulsing, right?

ContraMinds Podcast (13:52.904)

So we won’t talk about all 10 but let’s pick up a couple of them that was interesting and so the guys who really are what you call as thrivers, right? You call them people who have to go through the intensity of work but they know how to manage their burnout, right? That’s really the cohort that you identified as thrivers. So…

ContraMinds Podcast (14:20.805)

you talked about they actually doing pulsing very well. So talk to me a little bit about pulsing.

Nick Petrie (14:24.238)

Thanks

Yes, right. Well, I sort of think about this as the master habit of all of them because it’s sort of, it’s the one that informs the other nine habits. So if you think about how nature works, it works in rhythm. So if, if I was to ask you to breathe in and breathe in again and breathe in again, what do want to do? Breathe out. Why do you want to breathe out? Well, it’s not because breathing in is bad, breathing in is good, but when you only breathe in and don’t breathe out, it becomes unhealthy. You get too much carbon dioxide. 

So nature tends to pulse back and forward. We breathe in, we breathe out. The sun rises, the sun sets, the tides come in, the tides go out, our heart expands, our heart contracts. It is continuously pulsing and it doesn’t get tired. Nature pulses.

When you think about the way we work, often we’re exhausted because we’ve stopped pulsing. We think it’s because of the workload is massive, but sometimes it’s just we are not in rhythm with things. So if you think about a meeting, for example, how strenuous and tiring is a meeting? Well, it’s not very hard. You just sit on an expensive seat and drinks and coffee and have conversations with people. It’s not that hard.

But if you do eight in a row, how do you feel? You feel exhausted. Meetings aren’t hard, but you’ve stopped pulsing. And so one of the things we saw with these thrivers who were high achievers with low stress, they had worked this out. They’d worked out they need to pulse throughout the day to different modes. They will go from doing lots and lots of shallow work to deep uninterrupted focus work.

Nick Petrie (16:23.874)

They will go from high intensity concentration to switching off and going for a walk. They’ll go from inside to outside, from sitting to standing. They are pulsing in different modes, work mode to personal mode. And by doing that, they really can sustain their energy and intensity. So pulsing is something most of us don’t think about very much and the workplace doesn’t really design for it.

ContraMinds Podcast (16:53.937)

you

Nick Petrie (16:54.028)

So individuals need to think about this, but we’ve also had teams designing pulsing into the way they work as well.

ContraMinds Podcast (17:03.079)

Great. The concept of pulsing was something that was interesting to me. 

Q6

The other thing that you speak about is you have to balance your perform and grow mode. And that I thought was interesting because as I get more and more experience, I’m actually looking at being more in a perform mode and not in a grow mode.

ContraMinds Podcast (17:32.104)

And I thought it was a very insightful piece of, you work that I saw in the book, is how do you really balance, perform and grow more than you use a very lovely word called seek the heat, right? So what do you mean by seek the heat? And typically people say, you know what, I don’t want to be stressed out. So let me do work that’s comfortable. Right. So therefore I found that very interesting. So talk to me about at one end, you don’t want stress.

ContraMinds Podcast (18:10.857)

At the other end, you are preparing for the stress in bite sized ways. So explain the concept of seek the heat.

Nick Petrie (18:11.298)

Yeah.

Nick Petrie (18:17.901)

Yeah.

Nick Petrie (18:21.804)

Yeah. Okay. so originally I used to work at a place called the Center for Creative Leadership and we there were a research organization and we used to interview executives who came through and we had 30,000 leaders come through our programs each year and we would interview them, especially the really successful ones to see how did they become successful and one of the things which became very clear in the stories they would tell is that they became, when we got them to tell us stories about when you developed the most, that helped you become successful, they would always tell these stories of when they went through these really challenging situations, which grew them enormously. And these situations had five conditions. 

First, it was a first time experience. So they were thrown into this role or situation. They’d never seen it before. They didn’t know what to do. Results mattered. was a chance of success, a chance of failure. People were watching to see whether they were going to succeed or not. And the fifth part was these were extremely uncomfortable. And we ended up calling these heat experiences as in hot. It feels like the temperature has gone up on you. And the leaders all said at the you know, when they look back at it, they didn’t enjoy it. Often they didn’t want the experience. Their boss made them do it or something happened. They had to lead a merger or they had to negotiate with unions or first time working and living overseas. But looking back, they said that was when I grew the most and they would point out a series of heat experiences throughout their career. And they just said, I just keep growing and growing and growing and growing. And so it’s like, so that was one part of it.

Nick Petrie (20:14.518)

If you want to be really successful, lot of the CEOs I interviewed, basically they’d had so many heat experiences, anything which happened to them now didn’t feel very hard. And one of the CEOs, a Fortune 500 CEO said to him, his mantra was, do hard things. 

Do hard things. If you do hard things, it will be really hard, but later on everything else looks easy. And also your… so later on stuff which would have been so hard for you earlier in your career is easy. Your capacity is so big. So that’s the idea of seeking the heat and that is sort of on the grow side of the equation you mentioned the grow before.

ContraMinds Podcast (21:02.503)

So is it not slightly contradictory because at one end I don’t need stress, at the other end you are saying seek the heat or the heat experience. So therefore when I seek the heat experience I should not get stressed, right? So how do I balance that?

Nick Petrie (21:21.006)

Yeah. Well, if you think about what would happen if you never sought any heat, you know, would you live a would you be someone who has no stress in their life? Would you be a resilient person? Probably not, because events come to you like you can’t avoid the event. 

So the people I met who were the most resilient and who had learned to have lower stress, they had done hard things in their career. So things didn’t feel so hard. So it is not to avoid difficult things, but it is to know that when you take on heat assignments, there’ll be pressure there. So there’s going to be pressure and we can’t, you know, we define pressure as external demand in your environment. That doesn’t automatically lead to stress. 

Like for example, I don’t know about you, but I quite enjoy sort of big growth heat experiences. It’s stimulating. It’s interesting. I know I’m growing. I know I’m exploring. That doesn’t necessarily feel stressful for me. It does for some. For other people when they are doing repetitive work they’ve done before, a bit of a grind, for them that feels stressful. So…

The answer is not to avoid it. The answer is to learn how to cope with pressure without turning into stress. And one of the big lessons we’ve learned around that is learning not to ruminate about events. When you’re under pressure, focus on what you can control, stay present and watch out for a lot of rumination because that’s what turns pressure into stress.

Q7

ContraMinds Podcast (23:12.039)

So what that does is when you seek the heat experience, you start getting a certain amount of stress, so you know which degree of burns you are actually moving into. And therefore, the critical point that you make is don’t ruminate. So what’s the difference between

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rumination and reflection.

Nick Petrie (23:43.246)

All right, very good. All right. So one of the things we learn, you’ve done well reading this book, I can tell. 

The key things is to help people differentiate between pressure, which is external demand in your environment. And if you’ve got a job and you’re in this always on world, you’re going to have pressure. But when we ruminate, we turn it into stress and our body goes into fight or flight and we get all the hormones. So that’s one distinction. 

The second key one that you’ve pointed out there is, so I do a lot of work with surgeons actually, and the surgeons often will talk about looking back at an operation they did and thinking about the operation and what worked, but also what went wrong. Or they will prepare for an upcoming surgery and how they’ll handle it and what will they do if things go wrong. And they said to me, well, is that rumination? And the answer is no. Not necessarily. It depends. 

Ruminations is when you’re thinking over and over about events from the past and the future, attaching negative emotion and churning. Why did I make that mistake? What if this happens? What if that happens? What if I’m fired? All of this. We call that below the line thinking and it’s got the negative emotion. Above the line is reflection. And this is when you are planning for the future in a neutral or detached way, or reviewing the past in a neutral detached way. That’s not rumination and you don’t go into fight or flight. So reflection is important, rumination is stressful.

ContraMinds Podcast (25:26.215)

Beautiful, excellent. 

Q8

The other reason I think people get into stress, which you write about Nick, which resonated a lot with me is values, alignment and stress. That’s a beautiful point because many people really don’t understand what their inner values are.

ContraMinds Podcast (25:53.244)

they didn’t go into an environment where the values are not aligned with their own, you know… that probably they really stand for and that creates a kind of a what I call as a Brownian movement in your head or in your mind right. So therefore how important is values, alignment and stress and how do you really understand this as we get into say a new job or a new role and some people actually say you know what that’s not in line with my values therefore I am not going to take

ContraMinds Podcast (26:30.757)

up that role. So therefore that’s a very deep understanding of yourself that you need. So how do I go through that process?

Yeah, Yeah, good. This was a really surprising thing we learned when we did the interviews and the research was because the way burnout and stress is often talked about, it’s just like to do with workload. Like people have got too much work, therefore they’re burning out. But when we interviewed people who had burned out, we saw that actually often, sometimes it was workload, but often it wasn’t. They weren’t working that hard, but they had a bad fit with their role or their company. And we started to identify this thing around values alignment. 

When people were values misaligned, they would keep working hard, but they didn’t care or see any purpose in the work they were doing. In fact, sometimes it was against their values. It was completely misaligned. And so they keep working hard, but they became angry often. Probably the best word is they became resentful of how much of themselves they were giving and they were getting nothing back in return. And people who stick like that for too long become at very high risk of burning out. 

Now, interestingly, people who have very high values alignment, so you see this sometimes in healthcare, or you might see it with founders, you see it with not-for-profits, but you also just see it in regular businesses. Really high values alignment. They were also at risk of burning out because they just loved what they were doing so much you know, there were more patients to serve. There were more people to help and they would just give so much of themselves. They would burn themselves out. 

So high or low values alignment was risky. And really, you know, to your question of how do you find this stuff out?

Nick Petrie (28:34.9)

It takes deep reflection on experiences you’ve had. If you think about all the different places you’ve worked, which ones felt right and which ones didn’t and why. And it takes generally just reflection on what do I care about? What matters to me and what will I not tolerate? And that takes experience and reflection and reflection is something which people don’t do enough of. They tend to get on autopilot and can drift for a long time. That’s my experience.

ContraMinds Podcast (29:14.119)

That’s really true, Nick. 

What I’ve seen, which is really what I want to share is the expectation that people have is, you know what, every year I need to get promoted, I need to get an increment, I need to go up the ladder. But what you’re really saying is there are people who say that I’m an individual contributor. I like working on something deep.

ContraMinds Podcast (29:39.46)

I don’t really love to manage people. That doesn’t really excite me. That means that I’m actually going to do this job in this role. And I may not grow in the organization, but I may grow professionally. So this values alignment is really what you’re talking about.

Nick Petrie (29:44.515)

Yeah.

Nick Petrie (29:51.587)

Mmm.

Nick Petrie (29:56.012)

Yes.

Nick Petrie (30:00.908)

Yes. And yeah, and to your point there, you you said a couple of important things. One was working out what you value, but then two was making decisions based on that, which might be, I want to be an individual contributor. And we saw, we saw people do that and it made them happier. One challenge, you know, to make it real is people feel like, well, I’ve got to earn an income. I’ve got to support my family. Maybe I don’t like this job or it’s not a good fit, but I have to earn money so it needs to be realistic. 

What we found was risky. Sometimes we all get in situations like that, but it is how long do you stick in that situation or over time? Do you just move in a direction for better fit for you is the important thing rather than think, okay, I’ve got to throw everything away tomorrow and quit my job. It’s not that.

Q9

ContraMinds Podcast (31:00.241)

So therefore you write a very interesting line in the book. You say the modern worker is like an air traffic controller. Right? I really love that analogy. So talk to me about that analogy.

Nick Petrie (31:08.366)

Yeah. Well, it follows one of the chapters where we talk about doing deep work, which is deep, uninterrupted focus work. And that has been a very popular experiment for people to run that we’ve sort of been doing this work with. But one thing which comes up is they’re like, well, I really love doing this, but I’ve also got like 90 other tasks which I need to be doing.

How do I manage those? And what we found is there’s, there was actually, well, it’s sort of like an air traffic controller. We are at a busy airport and all of these planes are taking off and the air traffic controller, I used to work with them. They need to be monitoring all the planes. You know, they can’t like just miss a plane. So they need to be monitoring all these planes. They need to land them all safely and they can’t land them all at the same time. They need to sequence the landing and they also need to hand off the planes to other controllers and other jurisdictions when they move from India to New Zealand. And so they need a method for tracking all these planes. And so they have a system and they have a dashboard and they can see all the planes on their dashboard. 

And when we studied the Thrivers, we noticed that they had very good systems for tracking all of the tasks and to-dos they had. And it wasn’t in their head. They had a visual method out there that they had designed, which was sort of mirrored their inner world. It was a good fit, which meant that nothing got dropped. All the planes, they knew where they were and they knew how to sequence and land the right ones. So that was that metaphor. You know, the question is, do you have a good reliable system to monitor all the planes which are taking off in your work and life? And most people have a pretty poor system for that. And that’s one reason their brain won’t switch off. It keeps trying to remind them, don’t forget this, don’t forget that. They don’t have a good system.

Q10

ContraMinds Podcast (33:24.88)

Our schools, colleges, don’t teach you this. So therefore, the real challenge is when I finish my graduation or when I finish my school, I’m thrown into this workplace where I have to behave like an air traffic controller. So therefore, literally, I’m not prepared in the first, say, 20 years of my life. And therefore, when I’m thrown into this world, I just don’t know how to manage.

ContraMinds Podcast (34:04.753)

So is there a need for probably our education systems to actually prepare people for an environment like this, which is, you know what, I know that I’m having my midterm test, I’m having my final exams, I have my… college assignments, so everything seems to be planned but life is not like that, right? So therefore, you know, if schools were to prepare you and college were to prepare you for surprise tests, surprise assignments, multiple assignments in the same day, three tests on the same day, okay? Would that kind of prepare such people for a world like this?

Nick Petrie (34:44.256)

Well, it’s a starting point, isn’t it? You if you think you’ve got me thinking back to my university days of like, yeah, that’s right. The assignments and all that. And I wasn’t very organized. I certainly didn’t have a method for doing it. So I think it gives you a bit of a taste of it. They certainly don’t give you guidance on how to do it. You were just left to work it out yourself. I would also say it’s the same in the workplace, though. 

I don’t think… I don’t know what it’s like in India, but in all the countries I work in in North America and over here, people don’t get taught how to manage everything very well. And so they don’t have good systems. What we’ve found is it’s hard to be prescriptive because everyone’s situation is so different and everyone’s personality and brain is quite different. But what we found to be most helpful is to get people talking about their systems and showing each other what is the systems you use to manage everything, to manage all your tasks, to manage all your meetings, to manage all that. When we had them sharing with each other, they learned tons off each other because they were in similar situations. And some people just had real best practice methods, which other people were able to steal, but no one talks about it. And we’re like, wow, wouldn’t you want to learn from the people in your organization who have great ways of managing this because they’re less stressed and they’re more organized and they’re more productive. So that’s the sort of conversations where you orchestrate.

Q11

ContraMinds Podcast (36:21.403)

That’s an interesting segue into my last few questions that I have, which is you move from individual to organizations, right? And therefore, you really differentiate between a thriver organization and…

Nick Petrie (36:33.058)

Right. Yeah.

ContraMinds Podcast (36:42.215)

traditional organizations where work is managed. And I loved one more sentence of yours where you said workloads are like gardens, right? Okay. Talk to me a little bit about that because if I were say a team leader or a manager running a team or if I was CEO running a large team.

ContraMinds Podcast (37:07.331)

I love some of the examples there. when workloads are like gardens, what do you do to a garden pretty much applies as an analogy to the various tasks and meetings and recurring meetings that happens in offices. So talk to me about it and give me that analogy that you have written about. It’s a beautiful analogy.

Nick Petrie (37:27.374)

All right. Great. Yes. So it came from I went along to do a session and they said, with our company so overloaded workloads are expanding. We’re hearing in the surveys. We need to do something about the workload. So I came along and people would sit and people said, well, we did something on workloads two years ago and we still have this problem. 

And, I was like, yes, of course you do have this problem because workloads are like a garden. They never stop expanding. And so if you think about what do you do with the garden? Well, if you neglect it, it will keep growing, but not the stuff you want. You’ll get weeds, you’ll get overgrown shrubs, all sorts of stuff will turn out and it doesn’t take very long. What you need to do, anyone who’s had a garden, is you need to pull the weeds out. You need to plan what is what you want in there, what you want to plant, take out the things you don’t so that they can get the resources they need and don’t get starved out by the weeds, which you don’t want. 

And when I ask people who garden a lot, how often do you need to do it? They say like every day or every second day, you’ve got to be onto it a lot. And so it is with workplaces. If you are not monitoring the number of meetings, how many people are in them, the level of communications, interruptions, it will just expand, expand, expand. 

So we found the most effective teams and organizations were like ruthless gardeners. They were continually subtracting meetings, deleting meetings, shortening them or spreading them out in a wider cadence, having less people in them. So meetings was one, but emails making them shorter, clearer, more concise with good subject lines, basic stuff, but all of that maintenance on your garden makes a huge difference because it wastes everyone’s time. And interestingly, going from the individual, there’s so much you can do at the individual level, which is really good and you should, but at some point, unless you are going to collectively work on these things, no individual can solve it on their own because, you know, someone’s going to keep creating ridiculous long meetings and inviting everyone who doesn’t need to be there.

Q12

ContraMinds Podcast (39:53.64)

So therefore, if I were running an organization and you are giving the top two, three, I would say rules or algorithms to create a thrivers workplace, what would you suggest they experiment with?

Nick Petrie (40:08.814)

Mmm.

Nick Petrie (40:13.966)

Yeah. Well, we’ve done this in the last two years with organizations. We went in and experimented with them to see which things they found the most useful. So I can tell you the most impactful and popular ones. 

One is around collective deep work. So one thing that people really want to do, like they don’t want ping pong tables and they don’t want, you know, a cafeteria and all this stuff necessarily. A lot of people, just want to do the job they got hired to do without getting constantly interrupted. They want to feel productive. So when we had teams and then later organizations either choose a time as a group when they would do deep, focused, uninterrupted work with no notifications, no emails, no other responses, 90 minutes, just concentrate on one or two high value tasks. People loved it and they felt productive and they created more value and they were less stressed because they weren’t switching their attention from one to one to one. So running deep work experiments is really powerful. 

Another one around…well, meetings would be a second one. Clean up your meetings, do a meeting audit and say which meetings could we delete? Which used to be valuable but no longer are? What could be shortened? How could we have less people? So people are freed up to do deep work. 

Probably the third one would be around what about after hours? At what point, what rules or norms do we have for when people can switch off after work? 

And what we found is people need to be available if there’s an emergency, but they would have their phones on. But a lot of teams had an agreement, let’s have our phones on. If there’s an emergency, we ring each other, we respond, we solve the problem, but we don’t need to be checking notifications all night long. We’d be better to recover. So those are three, which just alone can make a big difference with very little effort, to be honest.

ContraMinds Podcast (42:24.913)

Very nice, very nice. 

Q13

What does success mean to you?

Nick Petrie (42:32.013)

Okay.

Nick Petrie (42:39.02)

Aha.

It is, I guess on a career level, I see myself as being a bit of a conduit between the wisdom which is out there in the world, but it’s not really… it is not condensed and clarified and simplified yet. So success to me, what I see is taking the wisdom which is out there, being a conduit which can communicate that to the people who need it, who this would alleviate their suffering or help them. So for me in my career, if I can keep doing that over the course of my career, then that is success. And then also living my values and my larger personal life with my family is very important to me, which is what I’m trying to do now this week.

Swami:

I really love the analogy of the conduit and it’s a beautiful way of defining success.

(43:47)

Q14

If I were an 18-year-old in a university today, what would be your advice to me? (1:14) 

Nick:

Yeah, I think in your 20s, it is to sample lots of things. A lot of young people, including my son, saying, what should I do when I grow up? I’m like, don’t worry about that. Just spend your 20s trying out lots of stuff and discovering. What do you like? What don’t you like? What’s a good fit for you? What’s not? Have a lot of experiences in your 20s. Sample. Sample a lot of things. And then in your 30s, start to zero in on areas based on those experiences which speak to your heart, feel like you’ve got passion for and some talents. And then going back to the start of our conversation, as you get into your 40s and 50s, you want to be leveraging the experiences that you’ve had and getting into perform mode.

Your 20s and 30s should be largely around grow mode. You’re trying to grow. Your 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond should be more around perform. You are using all the wisdom you’ve accumulated to do good things in the world and for your workplace and for your colleagues. 

Very nice. 

(45:08)

Q15

What’s one piece of advice? I’m sure you would have got a lot of advice through your career, which you really value and keep going back to one piece of advice that you’ve got.

Nick:

Hmm. I think this certainly, well, I mean, if I go back to the main mentor I had, Dr. Derek Roger, who taught me all about stress. And he, you know, when I was so stressed because of my cancer, he was the one who really helped pull me out of it.

And some of the best advice he got,  he told me was simply to wake up because all of my stress that I was doing was just these stories and movies I was playing in my head. And when he just got me and showed me how just to wake up  and become present again, I started to see none of the things I thought were happening were actually happening. They were just dreams I was having in my head.

So I think some of the most powerful piece of advice has been that reminder over and over, wake up. 

Wake up is a great way to kind of think about the advice. If you were to get three people on a dinner table, living or dead, who would you think you would want to have dinner with and why? I mean, at the moment, I’m not very religious, but I’ve been reading historical books about some of the historical religious figures.

ContraMinds Podcast (49:29.191)

Thanks Nick on that beautiful note. It was a lovely conversation. The book is phenomenal. I’m sure, you know, it’s going to become a bestseller because burnout is a real big problem that workplaces face and people face and you’ve done some very deep work on burnout. So thanks a lot for taking time and talking to me. It was a lovely conversation.