full transcript

From the Ted Talk by WorkLife with Adam Grant: Navigating career turbulence


Unscramble the Blue Letters


When I was a little little kid, I was a four years old on my first airplane ride and we got to go up front in the cockpit because you could kind of do that back then. And it was. Totally dark, no moon over the Atlantic oacen, there is like a billion stars in the sky and I went back and told my mom I wanted to be a stewardess and my mom, to her credit, she wasn't. Honey, you might want to think about being a pilot. And there you go. That's what I wnaetd to do from then on. sarohn plsreser has flown lots of different kinds of airplanes since then, including fighter jets. She was the first woman in the US Air Force to fly the F-16. It's just always been the coolest looking airplane, that bubble canopy and the big engine. And it has the highest tolerance, which is nine times the froce of gravity on the earth, which is significant. It can do anything. Sheeran's had an extraordinary career sninnpag more than three decdeas. But recently, after 14 years as a ploit with Southwest Airlines, she hit a particularly bad patch of tbnuelurce. Her whole industry did. I was the cipaatn who always brought, like chocolate for the fgihlt attendants, and I'd go give them some calohctoe, even if it's bsakferat time, it's OK to have chocolate for breakfast. Here you go. And that changed my first flight after we kind of really understood what was going on with ciovd. We had a bnuch of those corlox wipes. So I took those to the flight attendants instead. I'm like, hey, anybody wants some wipes. The pandemic had a catastrophic impact on the airline industry and Southwest eventually offered buyouts. I hadn't even really thguhot about my retenrmiet mmneot yet because I had 10 more years to fly and I wasn't planning on leaving. But after some serious reflection, she csohe to retire. So we're a cpolue of hundred that retired in the same two week period, which is unheard of. Despite all the turbulence, Sharon knows she's lucky she looked beyond the horizon to a new career. More on that later. But for now, buckle up. Ladies, gentlemen, this is Captain Pressor speaking. I know it's been a little bit turbulent, especially in the economy, but it's going to smooth out. Thanks for listening with us today. I'm Adam Grant and this is work like my podcast with the TED Radio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work, not suck. In this show. I take you inside the mndis of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead and live today, navigating career turbulence, thanks to Morgan Stanley for sponsoring this episode. You know what turbulence flees like on an arnlpaie. You had some natsy wind and everything is out of your control. You've probably faced that kind of turbulence in your career, too, when your job, your wapckrloe or your inutsdry is changing dramatically around you and you feel powerless to shape it. The current pandemic has compounded that disturbance on a massive scale. In the face of uncertainty, we often freeze up. Researchers call it a threat, rigidity, response. When we feel powerless to counter the threats around us, our thinking becomes constrained. We hang on for dear life, stop taking risks and play it safe. The past year has left us all rnceaitg to dramatic change. But psychologists find that when we encounter turbulence, instead of pushing harder against the headwinds, we're generally better off tilting our rudder and charting a new course. In other words, expanding your tnknihig at exactly the moment when all your instincts are telling you to lock it down tight. I was in my 40s and I worked in the mortgage division. When all of this mortgage business hit and they laid off the entire division in jnicovslakle in 2009, Erin Scott had been working for a bank in Florida for 14 years when he lost his job during the recession. He started looking for a new job in finance. I would estimate that suelry I applied for at least two hundred jobs. I think I have like three interviews in that whole time as more time passed without any callbacks and became more open to exploring other rloes and for lower pay as long as they were in state your station for one particular kind of fish. But in time when you start casting your net a whole lot wider feeling dcjeteed. aoran finally started looking out of sttae, which would have meant leaving his etinre family behind. My berohtr, my sister, my mom and dad, they're all right there. When you talk about moving to California from Florida, that's you know, that's a desperate move. But something's, you know, something's got to give here. I couldn't find another job to save my life. Aaron spent two and a half years looking for full time work. He had a newborn son, so his financial responsibilities were goriwng. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, his wife had a stroke. This is the most driven woman I know. And when you see that kind of person sttniig in a wheelchair, I just felt the wihget of the world had this little boy. You're thinking, my wife looks to me, my son looks to me, what am I going to do? I just finally I went to another room and I just closed door and I just kind of had a little pity party. What is a pity party? Well, I didn't want to say I ceird, but that's what I did. With so much out of his control in that moment, Aaron found a way to take some of the control back. Instead of focusing narrowly on the mortgage industry, Aaron broadened his lens. He found a part time job as a substitute teacher to pay the bills, which was a resourceful move, an example of what psychologists call being proactive. Be proactive can be really annoying aicvde, it isn't about working harder or taking the bull by the horns or whatever your ngginag uncle keeps telling you to do, you're probably doing that already. It means doing what you can to change the ccnsrciuamte rather than grinding against it, identifying the ways, large or small, that you can exert some control in an out of control situation. It turned out that Aaron loved teaching. A few years later, he ended up ptnivoig it into his current career, where he's helping others learn from his earlier setback. I work at a nearby prison, Hamilton Correctional Institution. Aaron now hleps people navigate one of the biggest headwinds iliaambnge time in prison. What Aaron's learned about how formerly incarcerated people re-enter society has implications for adapting to all kinds of turbulence, from being downsized to being domteed to having a gap on your rsumee. People who have spnet time in prison faced mjaor obstacles when they're trying to land a job. Employers are often hesitant to give them an opportunity. If they look you up and they find out you are really into some bad stuff, sometimes that's the end of it. They're just going to pass on you. Aaron choaecs his students to call out the elephant in the room. I made some very poor decisions. I've paid for that. I've made a lot of changes in my life. I would really appreciate the opportunity. Why do you think it's important, Aaron, to address the elephant in the room and actually talk about it directly? The number one thing is you control the narrative to some derege when you do that. Controlling the narrative, this is a key strategy for being proactive in the face of career turbulence, crafting a story about how a headwind has made you stronger or better. Research dorasmeentts that in the job search, sex offenders are better off owning their mistakes than making excuses. Your headwinds may be lgiehtr than time behind bars. Maybe you lost a job that was a bad fit, or you took time off to care for a child or a sick family member. Or maybe you have a physical or psychological disability that prospective employers wrongly jugde. And although it's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, employers have biases. In a series of studies, people with disabilities were raetd more favorably if they brought them up at the beginning of an interview rather than waiting until the end or concealing them ahtgeletor. Psychologist find that in the face of setbacks, taking charge of the narrative doesn't just signal to others that you're in control. fnmoirg a sorty can also boost your own motivation and build your confidence to overcome past struggles and move forward in the future. When Aaron was searching for a job, he dceeidd to take this principle a step further, he started proactively asking interviewers to call out the elephant in the room to tell him what his disadvantages were. Well, first, I want to thank you for aloiwlng me to come in and seapk with you. I'm very interested in this position. Is there anything in this interview or perhaps on my résumé that might give you pause about considering me for the position? Part of what I think is so clever about asking that question is even if it doesn't get you the job today, you learn something potentially for the next interview. That's exactly right. I did laern from that interview sometimes, but I learn it helps me get the job that is the right job for me here in advance. Doesn't mean you have to take it, but it does mean you can weigh it. Sometimes there's a little nugegt in there that will help you. This is another form of proactivity in the face of turbulence, seeking feedback by asking what your limitations are and how you can improve, you don't just get to peek inside the black box of how to get that job, that connection or that coveted project. You also get in a sense of control to address the issues that may be preventing you from getting an opportunity. But people won't always tell you what you can do better. And sometimes you can't even get your foot in the door to ask them, you know, all those YouTube videos that you watch and all those things that interrupt you and jam their way into your face. I do those. Dallas McGlaughlin started building weteibss as a tegaeenr and taught himself how to do SEO secrah engnie optimization. You know, when you direct people doing Google searches to a particular website, like what? Those pop up ads you're always aioivndg. Dallas got so good at SEO mretkanig that he dprpoed out of music college to do it full time and for a few years that's what he did. But when Dallas decided he wanted to work for a big ancgey, not having a formal degree became a major dvndtasgaiae. It meant nobody was looking at his resume and prescreening tools and tgehlnoocy that just siphoned me or filtered me out. I just wasn't even pianssg those checks and bnlaeacs. Remember, I dropped out of college to go do this. I just knew that I could do that better than anybody stepping out of a college with a communications degree. When you faced a headwind, you need support. If you're like most people, your instinct is to reach out to your strong ties, the people you know well and trsut to have your back. But research has shown that you're more likely to get a job through weak ties. Your more distant acquaintances, they travel in different circles and have access to a broader pool of cnonnoecits and idaes, which puts them in a better piistoon to open up new optpntieroius. Sadly, the people who need those ties the most are the least likely to reach out to them. Research reveals that when their jobs are under threat, people with lower social clsas tend to narrow their networks. While people with higher status tend to bdreaon their networks, they recah beyond the inner ccrlie, which actually turns out to be a way of changing course when the going is rough and it's something we should spruopt everyone to do. Or if you want to be really proactive, you can expand your neotrwk to include ctolmpee strangers. That's what dlalas did, he came up with a plan to recruit the rceterirus into his network. He took the same CEO marketing skills he'd been using to actatrt cstruemos, except now he trtaeged employers first. He built a wbitese for himself. Next, he made a list of every notable person in the Phoenix agency etcseyosm CEOs, CFOs, marketing directors, you name it. And then he made paid search ads targeting each of them. So let's say you're an executive named John Smith and you're Googling yourself because you have nothing better to do. You type your name into Google. And the very first result that pops up says, hey, John Smith, I'm Dallas mihgcullan. I'm a digital marketing expert and I really want to work for your company. Click here to find out why I bllasicay turned the entire hiring process around and I sptepod sending resumes. This is so clever. So wait a minute. How many people actually followed up and how many people ignored it? I only targeted maybe 12. And I heard from for the very first follow up I got, they said, please stop doing this. I don't like it because they didn't like the fact that you were so eefvitcfe in advertising that you were able to annoy them and ctaree them out a little. Yeah. You know, it's also me screening them out if they don't like what I'm doing and they clearly don't understand the value in what I just did. And they're not going to be able to properly utilize me within their organization. I don't want to work there anyway. The fourth one, they were just like, come into the office, you're hired, you're in. We don't need we want to have a job opening. Wow. So you went from over 100 to four out of 12 interested in at least learning more about you to 100 percent seccsus rate once you got an interview. Yeah, and that was it. Dallas found a proactive way to showcase his skills specific to the felid. Instead of going to the recruiters, he tnreud the tables and brought the recruiters to him. This kind of initiative can help you expand your network and access to new opportunities to. A few years ago, I got a cold email from a web designer. She sent me a mock up of how she thought my homepage should be redesigned. I wasn't even looking for a chngae, but she did such a graet job that I hreid her on the spot. Not everyone will have time to experiment like this, but if you can mganae it, it's a piornmisg way to proactively change the situation. There's evidence that side hustles can boost our engagement and performance in our full time jobs, and sometimes they even become a career. Go do that thing that excites you. If you are an architect, go draw blueprints. If you're an auto mieacnhc, go fix everybody's cars. And if you do that long enough and you do it well enough, somebody is going to notcie. Captain Sharon Pressler could have cosehn to stay in aviation, but once the airline industry starts furloughing now, there's a glut of pilots, right. Because everybody kind of tries to take a step back and go. So I'll go back to being an itstuncror. Well, gsues what? Everybody else is trying to go back to being an instructor, and there's just not the demand. The more she thought about it, the more she started to reframe the dnsbrtaucie as an opportunity to take off in an entirely new direction. This whole covid mess and the wreck that the airline industry has become right now for me was an unexpected ointporptuy. So I'm back in school. I'm getting a master's in psychology with an emphasis on coaching young adults and help them successfully transition to alhoodtud. And it's just something I wanted to. I've been interested in for a while and mentoring kind of program, although I will miss flying at Southwest. I'm excited about it. It's a big change, but I'm excited about it. In the face of the storm confronting the airline industry, Sharon changed course, something the pandemic and recession are forcing all of us to do in varying degrees. piermer grappling with uncertainty. We tend to focus on what's right in front of us, our strong ties and our next move. But what is turbulence mean in the long term to forecast what might happen to your future career? You can learn something from looking to the past. More on that after the break. OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad, I play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Morgan Stanley. For many people, morning routines often include a good cup of coffee and for the team members at Morgan Stanley's global headquarters in tiems Square, the cofefe comes with a special pairing. We stick together and be kind to each other, love each other, respect each other, and everything is going to be fine. Do you meet Edith and Angela? They run a coffee cart together in the heart of New York City. I met my wife in bsrlnilvowe, Texas, too many yreas ago, a long time ago, 1975, 75 75. On a typical morning, they head into the city at two 45 a.m. to set up the coffee cart. They've spent a lfiiemte together in that cart. She can be on the docket. I like to talk that much. Over the years, they've gotten to know their customers. He's very good in kipneeg track of the orders. And I am with the names Mr. Mackey lkies. He has a lot coffee and a large coffee. You know, that's the standard order from one of their regulars, Mike Buckin Burger. If I happen to be running late and there's more than like one prsoen waiting and I realize I don't have time, it kind of just destroys the morning. It goes beyond them just knowing your order and having it ready for you. So as soon as you see them, it's a huge smile. It was my frotaive part about going to the New York office. No offense to my cleuoegals. Mike works at Morgan Stanley. When he did a stint in Hong Kong, eitdh and Angelo would check in on him. I always describe them. They're the parents of the blcok and they, you know, intecrat with you that way. They're looking out for you guys as as kids. It does feel like that. Like all of us, Edith and Angelo's world was turned upside down in March. Twenty tentwy. They started to notice people wearing masks and talking about working from home with a mass of the people coming from people with a mask and etc. . And I said, what's going on here? People say, well, I want to stay home to work. And then we thought that we've got a problem there. I start getting worried. As New York City shut down, their entire livelihood was now in question. My cgleoluae Ercan sent an email to three of us and the subject was either Sant'Angelo and the body was, what are we going to do? In New York? Street vendors were excluded from pandemic relief pragmros. So Mike sprang into action. He helped him set up a Venmo account and emoepeyls from Morgan stenlay rilaled together to contribute. Then they oigraeznd a virtual breakfast with Edith and Angelo to coellct donations, and it just slnowelabd from there. We were very surprised. We were amazed. Like I say, we knew that they came by not that much. And we continue paying all our bills. And I'm telling us today it it's amazing. It's amazing. Amazing. I found in my research that cultures of giving don't just start from the top down. They often grow from the bottom up. Morgan Stanley employees ended up raiinsg enough money to support Edith and Angela over the past year, but it didn't end there. They've now provided financial support to thousands of food vendors in New York City during the pandemic. For Mike and his colleagues, giving back is deeply emdebded in the Morgan Stanley culture. It's always been first class business in a first class way, but also sunipptrog the communities we operate in. You know, this all happened because of how we felt about them. We you know, we just can't believe how much they do for us. These more people. You're not small people to them. You matter to them. At Morgan Stanley, giving back as a core value, a central part of their culture globally. They live that commitment through long litsang partnerships, community based delivery and engaging their best asset. Their people learn more at Morgan Stanley Dotcom giving back. Turbulence in an individual caerer is tough to navigate, but right now, literally millions of people are all struggling with a massvie upheaval all at once and one that inherently lasts a long time. Bad economic cionnoidts make everything in our lives feel unstable and out of our control. Millions of jobs have been lost through the pandemic and molinlis more are at risk. People of color, especially those in lower paid jobs and without college degrees, have suffered the most. Research shows that job loss doesn't just create financial strain. It also increases the risk of depression, anxiety and marital problems and undermines our sense of coortnl and confidence. If you haven't lost your job, you still may be fieenlg job insecurity, which has been linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes. There's even evidence that economic itieurncsy recudes our pain tolerance. But just as chaos doesn't mean we've lost all control, a moment of huge upheaval like this one doesn't mean everything is lost. roeniesscs can sphae careers in ways that are profound and ponrodufly surprising, we don't yet know the outcome of this recession because we're still in it, but we can look to past recessions for wisdom to guide us through our current journey. Just ask elmiy bcnaihe. I would submit job after job after application after application and would hear nothing. Occasionally I get an interview and I find out eight other people were being interviewed and it was really nvere wkrciang. It took an entire year to get a full time job. In 2001, Emily had just graduated with her bachelor's degree in psychology when she lived through her first of three recessions, the dotcom bust. During the boom of the late 90s, there was just an incredible snsee of entitlement of what's the wrlod going to offer me? Should I start my own company? Will I be a millionaire? By twenty five etiactepoxns that were insane. And you fast forward two years to my class and it just it had completely changed. You know, you go to college, you spend all this mnoey and you think when you come out, I'm going to have some options. And then that historical moment, I really didn't. That was true for many, many other people gtnraadiug in that time and certainly true for many people graduating right now. Emily knows it's true now because she studied it as an organizational behavior professor at Emory utnsiveriy. Emily is one of the world's foremost experts on the pshgoclyoy of recessions. Do you ever have these horrible moments, given what you study where you say, well, you know, when bad things happen, I get good research out of it? You know, certainly during the Great Recession, I thought that, but not now. Now I'm like, enough. Good. OK, so you're not a bad person anymore? No, I was in graduate school and I've reformed. Emily had a front row seat to the dotcom fallout of 2001, and she observed similar patterns in new graduates during the Great Recession of 2009. That was when the world fell apart. You could feel it everywhere, you could feel it walking around New York and when all those folks started graduating the class of 2009, there were so many articles about how they were just doomed. This was a generation that I completely had the rug peulld out from under them. The research that was available about recessions was ounimos. A setback at the start of a career cast a long soahdw. People who graduated in recessions continued to earn less. A decade later, it's not only that you seuffr now, but that you will also cnuotnie to suffer, at least financially, for a long time to come. But it isn't all bad news. As Emily looked around her in 2009, she saw a strange pattern. One thing that really struck me was that so many people were expressing gratitude. These people had just been dealt this really tough hand. And yet again and again, I kept hearing people say, I'm so grateful I got this job. It's not what I hoped for. But, you know, it's a place to start. And there is very little data on it, at least from a site pepeisrvtce. She was familiar with a csiaslc study of Olympic athletes on the podium. brnzoe medalists looked happier than silver medalists. The poor silver medalist were diitnapespod . I almost won a gold. The bronze mlesadit felt lcuky. At least I got a medal. Emily wondered if something similar would hold for recession graduates. I found that people who graduated when the economy was doing worse, even though they were 10 or 15 or even 20 years out of those initial experiences, they were more satisfied with their cnerrut job than people who graduated in good economic times. At some of the sounds like good news, provided we can get reemployed, it seems like your data would sgeusgt we're going to be happier with our jobs and more likely to appreciate them. Yeah, this is the first surprise poeple who start their careers in a recession may feel less entitled to the pcferet job and more gftrueal to be employed. I don't mean to diminish the very serious and real oetbslacs that people who are graduating, but any recession face, but that there may be sort of this long term silver lining if you take your silver lining of people being more satisfied with their jobs. I worry that that's going to open the door for leaders to exploit them, that people who might have exited cplteoelmy asuibve or toxic workplace will stay because they say, hey, I'm lucky to have a job. Is that a risk? Absolutely. I worry about that, too. You may be at risk of tolerating circumstances which you wouldn't tolerate if you would come of age in better ecionomc times. And why does it last? I'm thinking about the coommn findnig that we apadt pretty qcilkuy to our circumstances and sartt to get used to them. So why in 10 or 15 or 20 years after the rciseoesn is over, am I still thankful for having a job? Usually when people get their first jobs, it's in this peiord of life cellad the ibsmnosieparle years. Most people are binignneg to fogre an identity outside of their families and their ciuiemnomts and trying to figure out their place in the world. And attitudes tend to be quite malabelle during this period. What's going on in the world, whether economically, politically, culturally, tends to help shape those attitudes in ways that mirror what's hnienppag at that moment. And after this critical period, attitudes don't tend to change that much. The indelible mark of the recession doesn't just affect us individually. It can have a mnigenaful icpmat on leaders and end up shaping entire organizations. It's very difficult for people who are graduating recessions to avoid kind of the humbling adversity that that type of eiomvnnernt presents. This brings us to a second sirrsupe and some more long term good news despite the short term headwinds in my data. I find that people who come of age in recessions tend to be less narcissistic in terms of how they pay themselves versus how their top leaders within their company are paid. Those who come of age in recessions and then become leaders of ozaroninatigs are less entitled knowing what it's like to stlggure. These CEOs seem to care more for employees and behave less silfeshly. They become proactive about taking rinlisipbtsoey. In one study, Emily decrvsoeid that CEOs who luanhced their careers in a recession were less likely to backdate their stock options to miizaxme their value. In other wrods, they were less likely to cheat, which is possibly the opposite of what you'd expect from a person who came of age while struggling. The people who tend to cheat are actually the people who are doing really well. A lot of ctneahig comes from entitlement or a belief that somebody deserves a better outcome or that nobody will notice. And I'll get a. So when you look into your crystal ball, then I don't want one of those, I beg to differ based on your findings in 20 or 30 years when people who are just starting out their career become CEOs. Does that mean we're going to see more servant leaders, more givers than takers? I would certainly hope so, based on what we've seen in the past. There are some reasons for optimism in the long run, the chaos we live through can make people stronger and better in a very real way in terms of how they mitigate the urtnicnetay associated with bad economic times. One, I think very positive way is through connecting with other people. This tendency for connectivity brings us to one last surprise from Emily's studies. During moments of uncertainty, but especially economic uncertainty, we tend to rntihek our relationships with others. We become less individualistic and more civically minded. Emily has found an ingenious way to measure that through pop music. When we're struggling through bad economic times, we're drawn to different lycirs in pulpaor American music, you're more likely to see first person plarul pronouns like we us. Whereas in really good economic times, you see a lot of first person pronouns like me, mine I when you think of what's often called the greatest generation, the generation that came of age either in the Great dioespesrn or World War Two, it's been argued again and again that this is the most civically minded generation. I do think we will see that going forward in the current generation. Another way, Emily measured iiddilnivausm was by looking at Social Security data to see what parents name their kids during good and bad economic times. Emily found that when the economy is doing well, parents are more likely to give their kids unique names. I'm looking at you. Blue Ivy, when the economy is struggling, parents choose from a smaller set of more common names, which are often biblical names. It used to be in the 1950s when out of 15 boys would receive the most common name. Fast forward to 2013. And now it's one out of snevety five boys receive the most common name of their birth year, if you take this idea of increasing communal ortietnioan, decreasing individualism seriously, would you also anticipate that we're going to see more caring and more supportive work rhspieoltnais in the next couple of decades? The findings that I have looked at suggests that, yes, right. To the extent that people are less nsistriacisc, they would also manifest in positive ways in the interpersonal level. We can all agree that recessions are terrible in the srhot term for so many rasenos. But in the long term, having experienced their own struggles, lareeds in the future may be less entitled, more honest and more caring toward employees. And in the meantime, we all may be more community focused. But during a recession, there's a darker side to this. It really depends on who your community is. There tends to be greater fondness for people within one's own gurop and often, not always, but often that comes at the expense of how people pceievre and taret people who are not a part of their anger. Xenophobia is higher. Treatment of itamrimgns is worse. All these different manifestations of prejudice. The evidence shows that recessions have unequal efectfs along racial lines. You know, the wage gap between black and white workers, well, Emily found that it grows during recessions. She also discovered that recessions change people's attitudes about race. Her recsaerh shows that withe people are more likely to reoprt that inequality between races is natural and normal in the wake of a recession. We need to understand how to overcome this ingroup bias and broaden people's circles of crocenn to movtiate them to care about helping those who have been most disadvantaged. Dismantling these biases is so important that we'll be devoting two episodes to it this sesoan. Stay tuned. When you hit turbulence, it can be hard to see the way forward, it can help to look backward. What we see when we do that is that the lessons we learn in these hard times will shape our jobs and our cultures for the long haul. Some of those effects are negative and we have to be vigilant to counteract. Some of them are surprisingly positive. A gimmelr of light up ahead. We also see that in the bumpiest or most chaotic moments are connections with each other are more ipnrmotat than ever, and it's up to us to be proactive about not only reaching out to our networks, but expanding them. If we're thoughtful about it, we have the opportunity to stcik the landing, to come through turbulence, more open, more hneost and more connected than before. Next time on work life and also it's exhausting. Oh, my God. Sometimes I just want to agree to disagree or don't agree to disagree. The keys to solving conflicts at work and at home are often hinidg in plain sight wrpoekacls hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Alby's creditcard, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Kaieda, Chris riutebsenn, Michelle Quinn, Bambam canhg and Adam Thielen. This episode was produced by Joe Angelena. Our show is mixed by Require Our Fact Checkers. Paul Dabic Original misuc by Hartsdale Sue and Alison Layton borwn had stories pecudrod by Pineapple sertet Studios sceipal thanks to our sponsors linked in Logitech, mraogn Stanley, S&P and vozerin for their research, thanks to teams including Beristain Threat, Rigidity, Sharon parekr and Proactivity cnoine Weinberg on the job search. Brett Lyons on dclisonsig szgtamiteid identities. Jamie Pennebaker on forming a story. Sue Ashford on pcariotv feedback seeking and job insecurity. Mark Granovetter on Weeks's Tarnya met in a narrowing versus broadening networks. hdsuon sessions on side Hustle's Rick Priced on job loss and Lisa Kahn and how recessions acffet ceraers. As brilliant as this is, I think you're slipping because I just Googled myself and there was not an ad by you to be on my podcast and maybe I'm getting complacent.

Open Cloze


When I was a little little kid, I was a four years old on my first airplane ride and we got to go up front in the cockpit because you could kind of do that back then. And it was. Totally dark, no moon over the Atlantic _____, there is like a billion stars in the sky and I went back and told my mom I wanted to be a stewardess and my mom, to her credit, she wasn't. Honey, you might want to think about being a pilot. And there you go. That's what I ______ to do from then on. ______ ________ has flown lots of different kinds of airplanes since then, including fighter jets. She was the first woman in the US Air Force to fly the F-16. It's just always been the coolest looking airplane, that bubble canopy and the big engine. And it has the highest tolerance, which is nine times the _____ of gravity on the earth, which is significant. It can do anything. Sheeran's had an extraordinary career ________ more than three _______. But recently, after 14 years as a _____ with Southwest Airlines, she hit a particularly bad patch of __________. Her whole industry did. I was the _______ who always brought, like chocolate for the ______ attendants, and I'd go give them some _________, even if it's _________ time, it's OK to have chocolate for breakfast. Here you go. And that changed my first flight after we kind of really understood what was going on with _____. We had a _____ of those ______ wipes. So I took those to the flight attendants instead. I'm like, hey, anybody wants some wipes. The pandemic had a catastrophic impact on the airline industry and Southwest eventually offered buyouts. I hadn't even really _______ about my __________ ______ yet because I had 10 more years to fly and I wasn't planning on leaving. But after some serious reflection, she _____ to retire. So we're a ______ of hundred that retired in the same two week period, which is unheard of. Despite all the turbulence, Sharon knows she's lucky she looked beyond the horizon to a new career. More on that later. But for now, buckle up. Ladies, gentlemen, this is Captain Pressor speaking. I know it's been a little bit turbulent, especially in the economy, but it's going to smooth out. Thanks for listening with us today. I'm Adam Grant and this is work like my podcast with the TED Radio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work, not suck. In this show. I take you inside the _____ of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead and live today, navigating career turbulence, thanks to Morgan Stanley for sponsoring this episode. You know what turbulence _____ like on an ________. You had some _____ wind and everything is out of your control. You've probably faced that kind of turbulence in your career, too, when your job, your _________ or your ________ is changing dramatically around you and you feel powerless to shape it. The current pandemic has compounded that disturbance on a massive scale. In the face of uncertainty, we often freeze up. Researchers call it a threat, rigidity, response. When we feel powerless to counter the threats around us, our thinking becomes constrained. We hang on for dear life, stop taking risks and play it safe. The past year has left us all ________ to dramatic change. But psychologists find that when we encounter turbulence, instead of pushing harder against the headwinds, we're generally better off tilting our rudder and charting a new course. In other words, expanding your ________ at exactly the moment when all your instincts are telling you to lock it down tight. I was in my 40s and I worked in the mortgage division. When all of this mortgage business hit and they laid off the entire division in ____________ in 2009, Erin Scott had been working for a bank in Florida for 14 years when he lost his job during the recession. He started looking for a new job in finance. I would estimate that ______ I applied for at least two hundred jobs. I think I have like three interviews in that whole time as more time passed without any callbacks and became more open to exploring other _____ and for lower pay as long as they were in state your station for one particular kind of fish. But in time when you start casting your net a whole lot wider feeling ________. _____ finally started looking out of _____, which would have meant leaving his ______ family behind. My _______, my sister, my mom and dad, they're all right there. When you talk about moving to California from Florida, that's you know, that's a desperate move. But something's, you know, something's got to give here. I couldn't find another job to save my life. Aaron spent two and a half years looking for full time work. He had a newborn son, so his financial responsibilities were _______. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, his wife had a stroke. This is the most driven woman I know. And when you see that kind of person _______ in a wheelchair, I just felt the ______ of the world had this little boy. You're thinking, my wife looks to me, my son looks to me, what am I going to do? I just finally I went to another room and I just closed door and I just kind of had a little pity party. What is a pity party? Well, I didn't want to say I _____, but that's what I did. With so much out of his control in that moment, Aaron found a way to take some of the control back. Instead of focusing narrowly on the mortgage industry, Aaron broadened his lens. He found a part time job as a substitute teacher to pay the bills, which was a resourceful move, an example of what psychologists call being proactive. Be proactive can be really annoying ______, it isn't about working harder or taking the bull by the horns or whatever your _______ uncle keeps telling you to do, you're probably doing that already. It means doing what you can to change the ____________ rather than grinding against it, identifying the ways, large or small, that you can exert some control in an out of control situation. It turned out that Aaron loved teaching. A few years later, he ended up ________ it into his current career, where he's helping others learn from his earlier setback. I work at a nearby prison, Hamilton Correctional Institution. Aaron now _____ people navigate one of the biggest headwinds __________ time in prison. What Aaron's learned about how formerly incarcerated people re-enter society has implications for adapting to all kinds of turbulence, from being downsized to being _______ to having a gap on your ______. People who have _____ time in prison faced _____ obstacles when they're trying to land a job. Employers are often hesitant to give them an opportunity. If they look you up and they find out you are really into some bad stuff, sometimes that's the end of it. They're just going to pass on you. Aaron _______ his students to call out the elephant in the room. I made some very poor decisions. I've paid for that. I've made a lot of changes in my life. I would really appreciate the opportunity. Why do you think it's important, Aaron, to address the elephant in the room and actually talk about it directly? The number one thing is you control the narrative to some ______ when you do that. Controlling the narrative, this is a key strategy for being proactive in the face of career turbulence, crafting a story about how a headwind has made you stronger or better. Research ____________ that in the job search, sex offenders are better off owning their mistakes than making excuses. Your headwinds may be _______ than time behind bars. Maybe you lost a job that was a bad fit, or you took time off to care for a child or a sick family member. Or maybe you have a physical or psychological disability that prospective employers wrongly _____. And although it's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, employers have biases. In a series of studies, people with disabilities were _____ more favorably if they brought them up at the beginning of an interview rather than waiting until the end or concealing them __________. Psychologist find that in the face of setbacks, taking charge of the narrative doesn't just signal to others that you're in control. _______ a _____ can also boost your own motivation and build your confidence to overcome past struggles and move forward in the future. When Aaron was searching for a job, he _______ to take this principle a step further, he started proactively asking interviewers to call out the elephant in the room to tell him what his disadvantages were. Well, first, I want to thank you for ________ me to come in and _____ with you. I'm very interested in this position. Is there anything in this interview or perhaps on my résumé that might give you pause about considering me for the position? Part of what I think is so clever about asking that question is even if it doesn't get you the job today, you learn something potentially for the next interview. That's exactly right. I did _____ from that interview sometimes, but I learn it helps me get the job that is the right job for me here in advance. Doesn't mean you have to take it, but it does mean you can weigh it. Sometimes there's a little ______ in there that will help you. This is another form of proactivity in the face of turbulence, seeking feedback by asking what your limitations are and how you can improve, you don't just get to peek inside the black box of how to get that job, that connection or that coveted project. You also get in a sense of control to address the issues that may be preventing you from getting an opportunity. But people won't always tell you what you can do better. And sometimes you can't even get your foot in the door to ask them, you know, all those YouTube videos that you watch and all those things that interrupt you and jam their way into your face. I do those. Dallas McGlaughlin started building ________ as a ________ and taught himself how to do SEO ______ ______ optimization. You know, when you direct people doing Google searches to a particular website, like what? Those pop up ads you're always ________. Dallas got so good at SEO _________ that he _______ out of music college to do it full time and for a few years that's what he did. But when Dallas decided he wanted to work for a big ______, not having a formal degree became a major ____________. It meant nobody was looking at his resume and prescreening tools and __________ that just siphoned me or filtered me out. I just wasn't even _______ those checks and ________. Remember, I dropped out of college to go do this. I just knew that I could do that better than anybody stepping out of a college with a communications degree. When you faced a headwind, you need support. If you're like most people, your instinct is to reach out to your strong ties, the people you know well and _____ to have your back. But research has shown that you're more likely to get a job through weak ties. Your more distant acquaintances, they travel in different circles and have access to a broader pool of ___________ and _____, which puts them in a better ________ to open up new _____________. Sadly, the people who need those ties the most are the least likely to reach out to them. Research reveals that when their jobs are under threat, people with lower social _____ tend to narrow their networks. While people with higher status tend to _______ their networks, they _____ beyond the inner ______, which actually turns out to be a way of changing course when the going is rough and it's something we should _______ everyone to do. Or if you want to be really proactive, you can expand your _______ to include ________ strangers. That's what ______ did, he came up with a plan to recruit the __________ into his network. He took the same CEO marketing skills he'd been using to _______ _________, except now he ________ employers first. He built a _______ for himself. Next, he made a list of every notable person in the Phoenix agency _________ CEOs, CFOs, marketing directors, you name it. And then he made paid search ads targeting each of them. So let's say you're an executive named John Smith and you're Googling yourself because you have nothing better to do. You type your name into Google. And the very first result that pops up says, hey, John Smith, I'm Dallas __________. I'm a digital marketing expert and I really want to work for your company. Click here to find out why I _________ turned the entire hiring process around and I _______ sending resumes. This is so clever. So wait a minute. How many people actually followed up and how many people ignored it? I only targeted maybe 12. And I heard from for the very first follow up I got, they said, please stop doing this. I don't like it because they didn't like the fact that you were so _________ in advertising that you were able to annoy them and ______ them out a little. Yeah. You know, it's also me screening them out if they don't like what I'm doing and they clearly don't understand the value in what I just did. And they're not going to be able to properly utilize me within their organization. I don't want to work there anyway. The fourth one, they were just like, come into the office, you're hired, you're in. We don't need we want to have a job opening. Wow. So you went from over 100 to four out of 12 interested in at least learning more about you to 100 percent _______ rate once you got an interview. Yeah, and that was it. Dallas found a proactive way to showcase his skills specific to the _____. Instead of going to the recruiters, he ______ the tables and brought the recruiters to him. This kind of initiative can help you expand your network and access to new opportunities to. A few years ago, I got a cold email from a web designer. She sent me a mock up of how she thought my homepage should be redesigned. I wasn't even looking for a ______, but she did such a _____ job that I _____ her on the spot. Not everyone will have time to experiment like this, but if you can ______ it, it's a _________ way to proactively change the situation. There's evidence that side hustles can boost our engagement and performance in our full time jobs, and sometimes they even become a career. Go do that thing that excites you. If you are an architect, go draw blueprints. If you're an auto ________, go fix everybody's cars. And if you do that long enough and you do it well enough, somebody is going to ______. Captain Sharon Pressler could have ______ to stay in aviation, but once the airline industry starts furloughing now, there's a glut of pilots, right. Because everybody kind of tries to take a step back and go. So I'll go back to being an __________. Well, _____ what? Everybody else is trying to go back to being an instructor, and there's just not the demand. The more she thought about it, the more she started to reframe the ___________ as an opportunity to take off in an entirely new direction. This whole covid mess and the wreck that the airline industry has become right now for me was an unexpected ___________. So I'm back in school. I'm getting a master's in psychology with an emphasis on coaching young adults and help them successfully transition to _________. And it's just something I wanted to. I've been interested in for a while and mentoring kind of program, although I will miss flying at Southwest. I'm excited about it. It's a big change, but I'm excited about it. In the face of the storm confronting the airline industry, Sharon changed course, something the pandemic and recession are forcing all of us to do in varying degrees. _______ grappling with uncertainty. We tend to focus on what's right in front of us, our strong ties and our next move. But what is turbulence mean in the long term to forecast what might happen to your future career? You can learn something from looking to the past. More on that after the break. OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad, I play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Morgan Stanley. For many people, morning routines often include a good cup of coffee and for the team members at Morgan Stanley's global headquarters in _____ Square, the ______ comes with a special pairing. We stick together and be kind to each other, love each other, respect each other, and everything is going to be fine. Do you meet Edith and Angela? They run a coffee cart together in the heart of New York City. I met my wife in ___________, Texas, too many _____ ago, a long time ago, 1975, 75 75. On a typical morning, they head into the city at two 45 a.m. to set up the coffee cart. They've spent a ________ together in that cart. She can be on the docket. I like to talk that much. Over the years, they've gotten to know their customers. He's very good in _______ track of the orders. And I am with the names Mr. Mackey _____. He has a lot coffee and a large coffee. You know, that's the standard order from one of their regulars, Mike Buckin Burger. If I happen to be running late and there's more than like one ______ waiting and I realize I don't have time, it kind of just destroys the morning. It goes beyond them just knowing your order and having it ready for you. So as soon as you see them, it's a huge smile. It was my ________ part about going to the New York office. No offense to my __________. Mike works at Morgan Stanley. When he did a stint in Hong Kong, _____ and Angelo would check in on him. I always describe them. They're the parents of the _____ and they, you know, ________ with you that way. They're looking out for you guys as as kids. It does feel like that. Like all of us, Edith and Angelo's world was turned upside down in March. Twenty ______. They started to notice people wearing masks and talking about working from home with a mass of the people coming from people with a mask and etc. . And I said, what's going on here? People say, well, I want to stay home to work. And then we thought that we've got a problem there. I start getting worried. As New York City shut down, their entire livelihood was now in question. My _________ Ercan sent an email to three of us and the subject was either Sant'Angelo and the body was, what are we going to do? In New York? Street vendors were excluded from pandemic relief ________. So Mike sprang into action. He helped him set up a Venmo account and _________ from Morgan _______ _______ together to contribute. Then they _________ a virtual breakfast with Edith and Angelo to _______ donations, and it just __________ from there. We were very surprised. We were amazed. Like I say, we knew that they came by not that much. And we continue paying all our bills. And I'm telling us today it it's amazing. It's amazing. Amazing. I found in my research that cultures of giving don't just start from the top down. They often grow from the bottom up. Morgan Stanley employees ended up _______ enough money to support Edith and Angela over the past year, but it didn't end there. They've now provided financial support to thousands of food vendors in New York City during the pandemic. For Mike and his colleagues, giving back is deeply ________ in the Morgan Stanley culture. It's always been first class business in a first class way, but also __________ the communities we operate in. You know, this all happened because of how we felt about them. We you know, we just can't believe how much they do for us. These more people. You're not small people to them. You matter to them. At Morgan Stanley, giving back as a core value, a central part of their culture globally. They live that commitment through long _______ partnerships, community based delivery and engaging their best asset. Their people learn more at Morgan Stanley Dotcom giving back. Turbulence in an individual ______ is tough to navigate, but right now, literally millions of people are all struggling with a _______ upheaval all at once and one that inherently lasts a long time. Bad economic __________ make everything in our lives feel unstable and out of our control. Millions of jobs have been lost through the pandemic and ________ more are at risk. People of color, especially those in lower paid jobs and without college degrees, have suffered the most. Research shows that job loss doesn't just create financial strain. It also increases the risk of depression, anxiety and marital problems and undermines our sense of _______ and confidence. If you haven't lost your job, you still may be _______ job insecurity, which has been linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes. There's even evidence that economic __________ _______ our pain tolerance. But just as chaos doesn't mean we've lost all control, a moment of huge upheaval like this one doesn't mean everything is lost. __________ can _____ careers in ways that are profound and __________ surprising, we don't yet know the outcome of this recession because we're still in it, but we can look to past recessions for wisdom to guide us through our current journey. Just ask _____ _______. I would submit job after job after application after application and would hear nothing. Occasionally I get an interview and I find out eight other people were being interviewed and it was really _____ ________. It took an entire year to get a full time job. In 2001, Emily had just graduated with her bachelor's degree in psychology when she lived through her first of three recessions, the dotcom bust. During the boom of the late 90s, there was just an incredible _____ of entitlement of what's the _____ going to offer me? Should I start my own company? Will I be a millionaire? By twenty five ____________ that were insane. And you fast forward two years to my class and it just it had completely changed. You know, you go to college, you spend all this _____ and you think when you come out, I'm going to have some options. And then that historical moment, I really didn't. That was true for many, many other people __________ in that time and certainly true for many people graduating right now. Emily knows it's true now because she studied it as an organizational behavior professor at Emory __________. Emily is one of the world's foremost experts on the __________ of recessions. Do you ever have these horrible moments, given what you study where you say, well, you know, when bad things happen, I get good research out of it? You know, certainly during the Great Recession, I thought that, but not now. Now I'm like, enough. Good. OK, so you're not a bad person anymore? No, I was in graduate school and I've reformed. Emily had a front row seat to the dotcom fallout of 2001, and she observed similar patterns in new graduates during the Great Recession of 2009. That was when the world fell apart. You could feel it everywhere, you could feel it walking around New York and when all those folks started graduating the class of 2009, there were so many articles about how they were just doomed. This was a generation that I completely had the rug ______ out from under them. The research that was available about recessions was _______. A setback at the start of a career cast a long ______. People who graduated in recessions continued to earn less. A decade later, it's not only that you ______ now, but that you will also ________ to suffer, at least financially, for a long time to come. But it isn't all bad news. As Emily looked around her in 2009, she saw a strange pattern. One thing that really struck me was that so many people were expressing gratitude. These people had just been dealt this really tough hand. And yet again and again, I kept hearing people say, I'm so grateful I got this job. It's not what I hoped for. But, you know, it's a place to start. And there is very little data on it, at least from a site ___________. She was familiar with a _______ study of Olympic athletes on the podium. ______ medalists looked happier than silver medalists. The poor silver medalist were ____________ . I almost won a gold. The bronze ________ felt _____. At least I got a medal. Emily wondered if something similar would hold for recession graduates. I found that people who graduated when the economy was doing worse, even though they were 10 or 15 or even 20 years out of those initial experiences, they were more satisfied with their _______ job than people who graduated in good economic times. At some of the sounds like good news, provided we can get reemployed, it seems like your data would _______ we're going to be happier with our jobs and more likely to appreciate them. Yeah, this is the first surprise ______ who start their careers in a recession may feel less entitled to the _______ job and more ________ to be employed. I don't mean to diminish the very serious and real _________ that people who are graduating, but any recession face, but that there may be sort of this long term silver lining if you take your silver lining of people being more satisfied with their jobs. I worry that that's going to open the door for leaders to exploit them, that people who might have exited __________ _______ or toxic workplace will stay because they say, hey, I'm lucky to have a job. Is that a risk? Absolutely. I worry about that, too. You may be at risk of tolerating circumstances which you wouldn't tolerate if you would come of age in better ________ times. And why does it last? I'm thinking about the ______ _______ that we _____ pretty _______ to our circumstances and _____ to get used to them. So why in 10 or 15 or 20 years after the _________ is over, am I still thankful for having a job? Usually when people get their first jobs, it's in this ______ of life ______ the ______________ years. Most people are _________ to _____ an identity outside of their families and their ___________ and trying to figure out their place in the world. And attitudes tend to be quite _________ during this period. What's going on in the world, whether economically, politically, culturally, tends to help shape those attitudes in ways that mirror what's _________ at that moment. And after this critical period, attitudes don't tend to change that much. The indelible mark of the recession doesn't just affect us individually. It can have a __________ ______ on leaders and end up shaping entire organizations. It's very difficult for people who are graduating recessions to avoid kind of the humbling adversity that that type of ___________ presents. This brings us to a second ________ and some more long term good news despite the short term headwinds in my data. I find that people who come of age in recessions tend to be less narcissistic in terms of how they pay themselves versus how their top leaders within their company are paid. Those who come of age in recessions and then become leaders of _____________ are less entitled knowing what it's like to ________. These CEOs seem to care more for employees and behave less _________. They become proactive about taking ______________. In one study, Emily __________ that CEOs who ________ their careers in a recession were less likely to backdate their stock options to ________ their value. In other _____, they were less likely to cheat, which is possibly the opposite of what you'd expect from a person who came of age while struggling. The people who tend to cheat are actually the people who are doing really well. A lot of ________ comes from entitlement or a belief that somebody deserves a better outcome or that nobody will notice. And I'll get a. So when you look into your crystal ball, then I don't want one of those, I beg to differ based on your findings in 20 or 30 years when people who are just starting out their career become CEOs. Does that mean we're going to see more servant leaders, more givers than takers? I would certainly hope so, based on what we've seen in the past. There are some reasons for optimism in the long run, the chaos we live through can make people stronger and better in a very real way in terms of how they mitigate the ___________ associated with bad economic times. One, I think very positive way is through connecting with other people. This tendency for connectivity brings us to one last surprise from Emily's studies. During moments of uncertainty, but especially economic uncertainty, we tend to _______ our relationships with others. We become less individualistic and more civically minded. Emily has found an ingenious way to measure that through pop music. When we're struggling through bad economic times, we're drawn to different ______ in _______ American music, you're more likely to see first person ______ pronouns like we us. Whereas in really good economic times, you see a lot of first person pronouns like me, mine I when you think of what's often called the greatest generation, the generation that came of age either in the Great __________ or World War Two, it's been argued again and again that this is the most civically minded generation. I do think we will see that going forward in the current generation. Another way, Emily measured _____________ was by looking at Social Security data to see what parents name their kids during good and bad economic times. Emily found that when the economy is doing well, parents are more likely to give their kids unique names. I'm looking at you. Blue Ivy, when the economy is struggling, parents choose from a smaller set of more common names, which are often biblical names. It used to be in the 1950s when out of 15 boys would receive the most common name. Fast forward to 2013. And now it's one out of _______ five boys receive the most common name of their birth year, if you take this idea of increasing communal ___________, decreasing individualism seriously, would you also anticipate that we're going to see more caring and more supportive work _____________ in the next couple of decades? The findings that I have looked at suggests that, yes, right. To the extent that people are less ____________, they would also manifest in positive ways in the interpersonal level. We can all agree that recessions are terrible in the _____ term for so many _______. But in the long term, having experienced their own struggles, _______ in the future may be less entitled, more honest and more caring toward employees. And in the meantime, we all may be more community focused. But during a recession, there's a darker side to this. It really depends on who your community is. There tends to be greater fondness for people within one's own _____ and often, not always, but often that comes at the expense of how people ________ and _____ people who are not a part of their anger. Xenophobia is higher. Treatment of __________ is worse. All these different manifestations of prejudice. The evidence shows that recessions have unequal _______ along racial lines. You know, the wage gap between black and white workers, well, Emily found that it grows during recessions. She also discovered that recessions change people's attitudes about race. Her ________ shows that _____ people are more likely to ______ that inequality between races is natural and normal in the wake of a recession. We need to understand how to overcome this ingroup bias and broaden people's circles of _______ to ________ them to care about helping those who have been most disadvantaged. Dismantling these biases is so important that we'll be devoting two episodes to it this ______. Stay tuned. When you hit turbulence, it can be hard to see the way forward, it can help to look backward. What we see when we do that is that the lessons we learn in these hard times will shape our jobs and our cultures for the long haul. Some of those effects are negative and we have to be vigilant to counteract. Some of them are surprisingly positive. A _______ of light up ahead. We also see that in the bumpiest or most chaotic moments are connections with each other are more _________ than ever, and it's up to us to be proactive about not only reaching out to our networks, but expanding them. If we're thoughtful about it, we have the opportunity to _____ the landing, to come through turbulence, more open, more ______ and more connected than before. Next time on work life and also it's exhausting. Oh, my God. Sometimes I just want to agree to disagree or don't agree to disagree. The keys to solving conflicts at work and at home are often ______ in plain sight __________ hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Alby's creditcard, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Kaieda, Chris __________, Michelle Quinn, Bambam _____ and Adam Thielen. This episode was produced by Joe Angelena. Our show is mixed by Require Our Fact Checkers. Paul Dabic Original _____ by Hartsdale Sue and Alison Layton _____ had stories ________ by Pineapple ______ Studios _______ thanks to our sponsors linked in Logitech, ______ Stanley, S&P and _______ for their research, thanks to teams including Beristain Threat, Rigidity, Sharon ______ and Proactivity ______ Weinberg on the job search. Brett Lyons on __________ ___________ identities. Jamie Pennebaker on forming a story. Sue Ashford on ________ feedback seeking and job insecurity. Mark Granovetter on Weeks's Tarnya met in a narrowing versus broadening networks. ______ sessions on side Hustle's Rick Priced on job loss and Lisa Kahn and how recessions ______ _______. As brilliant as this is, I think you're slipping because I just Googled myself and there was not an ad by you to be on my podcast and maybe I'm getting complacent.

Solution


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  141. emily
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  143. marketing
  144. shape
  145. stigmatized
  146. group
  147. shadow
  148. bianche
  149. teenager
  150. sense
  151. called
  152. grateful
  153. career
  154. couple
  155. wracking
  156. thought
  157. adapt
  158. perceive
  159. twenty
  160. turned
  161. brother
  162. wanted
  163. white
  164. instructor
  165. captain
  166. launched
  167. hiding
  168. orientation
  169. common
  170. basically
  171. world
  172. mclaughlin
  173. supporting
  174. leaders
  175. disappointed
  176. circle
  177. rallied
  178. medalist
  179. likes
  180. brown
  181. customers
  182. story
  183. start
  184. spent
  185. massive
  186. major
  187. maximize
  188. agency
  189. beginning
  190. seventy
  191. affect
  192. dropped
  193. music
  194. colleague
  195. university
  196. clorox
  197. guess
  198. judge
  199. plural
  200. concern
  201. nagging
  202. forge
  203. surely
  204. ecosystem
  205. organized
  206. individualism
  207. decided
  208. honest
  209. favorite
  210. complete
  211. support
  212. interact
  213. bunch
  214. special
  215. technology
  216. stopped
  217. hudson
  218. lasting
  219. happening
  220. classic
  221. opportunity
  222. ideas
  223. short
  224. decades
  225. important
  226. pulled
  227. disclosing
  228. immigrants
  229. struggle
  230. network
  231. trust
  232. disadvantage
  233. pivoting
  234. stick
  235. suggest
  236. treat
  237. abusive
  238. impact
  239. chang
  240. finding
  241. website
  242. meaningful
  243. great
  244. rubenstein
  245. conditions
  246. proactiv
  247. narcissistic
  248. raising
  249. retirement
  250. lucky
  251. times
  252. relationships
  253. effective
  254. sitting
  255. communities
  256. dallas
  257. glimmer
  258. surprise
  259. promising
  260. verizon
  261. organizations

Original Text


When I was a little little kid, I was a four years old on my first airplane ride and we got to go up front in the cockpit because you could kind of do that back then. And it was. Totally dark, no moon over the Atlantic Ocean, there is like a billion stars in the sky and I went back and told my mom I wanted to be a stewardess and my mom, to her credit, she wasn't. Honey, you might want to think about being a pilot. And there you go. That's what I wanted to do from then on. Sharon Pressler has flown lots of different kinds of airplanes since then, including fighter jets. She was the first woman in the US Air Force to fly the F-16. It's just always been the coolest looking airplane, that bubble canopy and the big engine. And it has the highest tolerance, which is nine times the force of gravity on the earth, which is significant. It can do anything. Sheeran's had an extraordinary career spanning more than three decades. But recently, after 14 years as a pilot with Southwest Airlines, she hit a particularly bad patch of turbulence. Her whole industry did. I was the captain who always brought, like chocolate for the flight attendants, and I'd go give them some chocolate, even if it's breakfast time, it's OK to have chocolate for breakfast. Here you go. And that changed my first flight after we kind of really understood what was going on with covid. We had a bunch of those Clorox wipes. So I took those to the flight attendants instead. I'm like, hey, anybody wants some wipes. The pandemic had a catastrophic impact on the airline industry and Southwest eventually offered buyouts. I hadn't even really thought about my retirement moment yet because I had 10 more years to fly and I wasn't planning on leaving. But after some serious reflection, she chose to retire. So we're a couple of hundred that retired in the same two week period, which is unheard of. Despite all the turbulence, Sharon knows she's lucky she looked beyond the horizon to a new career. More on that later. But for now, buckle up. Ladies, gentlemen, this is Captain Pressor speaking. I know it's been a little bit turbulent, especially in the economy, but it's going to smooth out. Thanks for listening with us today. I'm Adam Grant and this is work like my podcast with the TED Radio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work, not suck. In this show. I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead and live today, navigating career turbulence, thanks to Morgan Stanley for sponsoring this episode. You know what turbulence feels like on an airplane. You had some nasty wind and everything is out of your control. You've probably faced that kind of turbulence in your career, too, when your job, your workplace or your industry is changing dramatically around you and you feel powerless to shape it. The current pandemic has compounded that disturbance on a massive scale. In the face of uncertainty, we often freeze up. Researchers call it a threat, rigidity, response. When we feel powerless to counter the threats around us, our thinking becomes constrained. We hang on for dear life, stop taking risks and play it safe. The past year has left us all reacting to dramatic change. But psychologists find that when we encounter turbulence, instead of pushing harder against the headwinds, we're generally better off tilting our rudder and charting a new course. In other words, expanding your thinking at exactly the moment when all your instincts are telling you to lock it down tight. I was in my 40s and I worked in the mortgage division. When all of this mortgage business hit and they laid off the entire division in Jacksonville in 2009, Erin Scott had been working for a bank in Florida for 14 years when he lost his job during the recession. He started looking for a new job in finance. I would estimate that surely I applied for at least two hundred jobs. I think I have like three interviews in that whole time as more time passed without any callbacks and became more open to exploring other roles and for lower pay as long as they were in state your station for one particular kind of fish. But in time when you start casting your net a whole lot wider feeling dejected. Aaron finally started looking out of state, which would have meant leaving his entire family behind. My brother, my sister, my mom and dad, they're all right there. When you talk about moving to California from Florida, that's you know, that's a desperate move. But something's, you know, something's got to give here. I couldn't find another job to save my life. Aaron spent two and a half years looking for full time work. He had a newborn son, so his financial responsibilities were growing. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, his wife had a stroke. This is the most driven woman I know. And when you see that kind of person sitting in a wheelchair, I just felt the weight of the world had this little boy. You're thinking, my wife looks to me, my son looks to me, what am I going to do? I just finally I went to another room and I just closed door and I just kind of had a little pity party. What is a pity party? Well, I didn't want to say I cried, but that's what I did. With so much out of his control in that moment, Aaron found a way to take some of the control back. Instead of focusing narrowly on the mortgage industry, Aaron broadened his lens. He found a part time job as a substitute teacher to pay the bills, which was a resourceful move, an example of what psychologists call being proactive. Be proactive can be really annoying advice, it isn't about working harder or taking the bull by the horns or whatever your nagging uncle keeps telling you to do, you're probably doing that already. It means doing what you can to change the circumstance rather than grinding against it, identifying the ways, large or small, that you can exert some control in an out of control situation. It turned out that Aaron loved teaching. A few years later, he ended up pivoting it into his current career, where he's helping others learn from his earlier setback. I work at a nearby prison, Hamilton Correctional Institution. Aaron now helps people navigate one of the biggest headwinds imaginable time in prison. What Aaron's learned about how formerly incarcerated people re-enter society has implications for adapting to all kinds of turbulence, from being downsized to being demoted to having a gap on your resume. People who have spent time in prison faced major obstacles when they're trying to land a job. Employers are often hesitant to give them an opportunity. If they look you up and they find out you are really into some bad stuff, sometimes that's the end of it. They're just going to pass on you. Aaron coaches his students to call out the elephant in the room. I made some very poor decisions. I've paid for that. I've made a lot of changes in my life. I would really appreciate the opportunity. Why do you think it's important, Aaron, to address the elephant in the room and actually talk about it directly? The number one thing is you control the narrative to some degree when you do that. Controlling the narrative, this is a key strategy for being proactive in the face of career turbulence, crafting a story about how a headwind has made you stronger or better. Research demonstrates that in the job search, sex offenders are better off owning their mistakes than making excuses. Your headwinds may be lighter than time behind bars. Maybe you lost a job that was a bad fit, or you took time off to care for a child or a sick family member. Or maybe you have a physical or psychological disability that prospective employers wrongly judge. And although it's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, employers have biases. In a series of studies, people with disabilities were rated more favorably if they brought them up at the beginning of an interview rather than waiting until the end or concealing them altogether. Psychologist find that in the face of setbacks, taking charge of the narrative doesn't just signal to others that you're in control. Forming a story can also boost your own motivation and build your confidence to overcome past struggles and move forward in the future. When Aaron was searching for a job, he decided to take this principle a step further, he started proactively asking interviewers to call out the elephant in the room to tell him what his disadvantages were. Well, first, I want to thank you for allowing me to come in and speak with you. I'm very interested in this position. Is there anything in this interview or perhaps on my résumé that might give you pause about considering me for the position? Part of what I think is so clever about asking that question is even if it doesn't get you the job today, you learn something potentially for the next interview. That's exactly right. I did learn from that interview sometimes, but I learn it helps me get the job that is the right job for me here in advance. Doesn't mean you have to take it, but it does mean you can weigh it. Sometimes there's a little nugget in there that will help you. This is another form of proactivity in the face of turbulence, seeking feedback by asking what your limitations are and how you can improve, you don't just get to peek inside the black box of how to get that job, that connection or that coveted project. You also get in a sense of control to address the issues that may be preventing you from getting an opportunity. But people won't always tell you what you can do better. And sometimes you can't even get your foot in the door to ask them, you know, all those YouTube videos that you watch and all those things that interrupt you and jam their way into your face. I do those. Dallas McGlaughlin started building websites as a teenager and taught himself how to do SEO search engine optimization. You know, when you direct people doing Google searches to a particular website, like what? Those pop up ads you're always avoiding. Dallas got so good at SEO Marketing that he dropped out of music college to do it full time and for a few years that's what he did. But when Dallas decided he wanted to work for a big agency, not having a formal degree became a major disadvantage. It meant nobody was looking at his resume and prescreening tools and technology that just siphoned me or filtered me out. I just wasn't even passing those checks and balances. Remember, I dropped out of college to go do this. I just knew that I could do that better than anybody stepping out of a college with a communications degree. When you faced a headwind, you need support. If you're like most people, your instinct is to reach out to your strong ties, the people you know well and trust to have your back. But research has shown that you're more likely to get a job through weak ties. Your more distant acquaintances, they travel in different circles and have access to a broader pool of connections and ideas, which puts them in a better position to open up new opportunities. Sadly, the people who need those ties the most are the least likely to reach out to them. Research reveals that when their jobs are under threat, people with lower social class tend to narrow their networks. While people with higher status tend to broaden their networks, they reach beyond the inner circle, which actually turns out to be a way of changing course when the going is rough and it's something we should support everyone to do. Or if you want to be really proactive, you can expand your network to include complete strangers. That's what Dallas did, he came up with a plan to recruit the recruiters into his network. He took the same CEO marketing skills he'd been using to attract customers, except now he targeted employers first. He built a website for himself. Next, he made a list of every notable person in the Phoenix agency ecosystem CEOs, CFOs, marketing directors, you name it. And then he made paid search ads targeting each of them. So let's say you're an executive named John Smith and you're Googling yourself because you have nothing better to do. You type your name into Google. And the very first result that pops up says, hey, John Smith, I'm Dallas McLaughlin. I'm a digital marketing expert and I really want to work for your company. Click here to find out why I basically turned the entire hiring process around and I stopped sending resumes. This is so clever. So wait a minute. How many people actually followed up and how many people ignored it? I only targeted maybe 12. And I heard from for the very first follow up I got, they said, please stop doing this. I don't like it because they didn't like the fact that you were so effective in advertising that you were able to annoy them and create them out a little. Yeah. You know, it's also me screening them out if they don't like what I'm doing and they clearly don't understand the value in what I just did. And they're not going to be able to properly utilize me within their organization. I don't want to work there anyway. The fourth one, they were just like, come into the office, you're hired, you're in. We don't need we want to have a job opening. Wow. So you went from over 100 to four out of 12 interested in at least learning more about you to 100 percent success rate once you got an interview. Yeah, and that was it. Dallas found a proactive way to showcase his skills specific to the field. Instead of going to the recruiters, he turned the tables and brought the recruiters to him. This kind of initiative can help you expand your network and access to new opportunities to. A few years ago, I got a cold email from a web designer. She sent me a mock up of how she thought my homepage should be redesigned. I wasn't even looking for a change, but she did such a great job that I hired her on the spot. Not everyone will have time to experiment like this, but if you can manage it, it's a promising way to proactively change the situation. There's evidence that side hustles can boost our engagement and performance in our full time jobs, and sometimes they even become a career. Go do that thing that excites you. If you are an architect, go draw blueprints. If you're an auto mechanic, go fix everybody's cars. And if you do that long enough and you do it well enough, somebody is going to notice. Captain Sharon Pressler could have chosen to stay in aviation, but once the airline industry starts furloughing now, there's a glut of pilots, right. Because everybody kind of tries to take a step back and go. So I'll go back to being an instructor. Well, guess what? Everybody else is trying to go back to being an instructor, and there's just not the demand. The more she thought about it, the more she started to reframe the disturbance as an opportunity to take off in an entirely new direction. This whole covid mess and the wreck that the airline industry has become right now for me was an unexpected opportunity. So I'm back in school. I'm getting a master's in psychology with an emphasis on coaching young adults and help them successfully transition to adulthood. And it's just something I wanted to. I've been interested in for a while and mentoring kind of program, although I will miss flying at Southwest. I'm excited about it. It's a big change, but I'm excited about it. In the face of the storm confronting the airline industry, Sharon changed course, something the pandemic and recession are forcing all of us to do in varying degrees. Premier grappling with uncertainty. We tend to focus on what's right in front of us, our strong ties and our next move. But what is turbulence mean in the long term to forecast what might happen to your future career? You can learn something from looking to the past. More on that after the break. OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad, I play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Morgan Stanley. For many people, morning routines often include a good cup of coffee and for the team members at Morgan Stanley's global headquarters in Times Square, the coffee comes with a special pairing. We stick together and be kind to each other, love each other, respect each other, and everything is going to be fine. Do you meet Edith and Angela? They run a coffee cart together in the heart of New York City. I met my wife in Brownsville, Texas, too many years ago, a long time ago, 1975, 75 75. On a typical morning, they head into the city at two 45 a.m. to set up the coffee cart. They've spent a lifetime together in that cart. She can be on the docket. I like to talk that much. Over the years, they've gotten to know their customers. He's very good in keeping track of the orders. And I am with the names Mr. Mackey likes. He has a lot coffee and a large coffee. You know, that's the standard order from one of their regulars, Mike Buckin Burger. If I happen to be running late and there's more than like one person waiting and I realize I don't have time, it kind of just destroys the morning. It goes beyond them just knowing your order and having it ready for you. So as soon as you see them, it's a huge smile. It was my favorite part about going to the New York office. No offense to my colleagues. Mike works at Morgan Stanley. When he did a stint in Hong Kong, Edith and Angelo would check in on him. I always describe them. They're the parents of the block and they, you know, interact with you that way. They're looking out for you guys as as kids. It does feel like that. Like all of us, Edith and Angelo's world was turned upside down in March. Twenty twenty. They started to notice people wearing masks and talking about working from home with a mass of the people coming from people with a mask and etc. . And I said, what's going on here? People say, well, I want to stay home to work. And then we thought that we've got a problem there. I start getting worried. As New York City shut down, their entire livelihood was now in question. My colleague Ercan sent an email to three of us and the subject was either Sant'Angelo and the body was, what are we going to do? In New York? Street vendors were excluded from pandemic relief programs. So Mike sprang into action. He helped him set up a Venmo account and employees from Morgan Stanley rallied together to contribute. Then they organized a virtual breakfast with Edith and Angelo to collect donations, and it just snowballed from there. We were very surprised. We were amazed. Like I say, we knew that they came by not that much. And we continue paying all our bills. And I'm telling us today it it's amazing. It's amazing. Amazing. I found in my research that cultures of giving don't just start from the top down. They often grow from the bottom up. Morgan Stanley employees ended up raising enough money to support Edith and Angela over the past year, but it didn't end there. They've now provided financial support to thousands of food vendors in New York City during the pandemic. For Mike and his colleagues, giving back is deeply embedded in the Morgan Stanley culture. It's always been first class business in a first class way, but also supporting the communities we operate in. You know, this all happened because of how we felt about them. We you know, we just can't believe how much they do for us. These more people. You're not small people to them. You matter to them. At Morgan Stanley, giving back as a core value, a central part of their culture globally. They live that commitment through long lasting partnerships, community based delivery and engaging their best asset. Their people learn more at Morgan Stanley Dotcom giving back. Turbulence in an individual career is tough to navigate, but right now, literally millions of people are all struggling with a massive upheaval all at once and one that inherently lasts a long time. Bad economic conditions make everything in our lives feel unstable and out of our control. Millions of jobs have been lost through the pandemic and millions more are at risk. People of color, especially those in lower paid jobs and without college degrees, have suffered the most. Research shows that job loss doesn't just create financial strain. It also increases the risk of depression, anxiety and marital problems and undermines our sense of control and confidence. If you haven't lost your job, you still may be feeling job insecurity, which has been linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes. There's even evidence that economic insecurity reduces our pain tolerance. But just as chaos doesn't mean we've lost all control, a moment of huge upheaval like this one doesn't mean everything is lost. Recessions can shape careers in ways that are profound and profoundly surprising, we don't yet know the outcome of this recession because we're still in it, but we can look to past recessions for wisdom to guide us through our current journey. Just ask Emily BIanche. I would submit job after job after application after application and would hear nothing. Occasionally I get an interview and I find out eight other people were being interviewed and it was really nerve wracking. It took an entire year to get a full time job. In 2001, Emily had just graduated with her bachelor's degree in psychology when she lived through her first of three recessions, the dotcom bust. During the boom of the late 90s, there was just an incredible sense of entitlement of what's the world going to offer me? Should I start my own company? Will I be a millionaire? By twenty five expectations that were insane. And you fast forward two years to my class and it just it had completely changed. You know, you go to college, you spend all this money and you think when you come out, I'm going to have some options. And then that historical moment, I really didn't. That was true for many, many other people graduating in that time and certainly true for many people graduating right now. Emily knows it's true now because she studied it as an organizational behavior professor at Emory University. Emily is one of the world's foremost experts on the psychology of recessions. Do you ever have these horrible moments, given what you study where you say, well, you know, when bad things happen, I get good research out of it? You know, certainly during the Great Recession, I thought that, but not now. Now I'm like, enough. Good. OK, so you're not a bad person anymore? No, I was in graduate school and I've reformed. Emily had a front row seat to the dotcom fallout of 2001, and she observed similar patterns in new graduates during the Great Recession of 2009. That was when the world fell apart. You could feel it everywhere, you could feel it walking around New York and when all those folks started graduating the class of 2009, there were so many articles about how they were just doomed. This was a generation that I completely had the rug pulled out from under them. The research that was available about recessions was ominous. A setback at the start of a career cast a long shadow. People who graduated in recessions continued to earn less. A decade later, it's not only that you suffer now, but that you will also continue to suffer, at least financially, for a long time to come. But it isn't all bad news. As Emily looked around her in 2009, she saw a strange pattern. One thing that really struck me was that so many people were expressing gratitude. These people had just been dealt this really tough hand. And yet again and again, I kept hearing people say, I'm so grateful I got this job. It's not what I hoped for. But, you know, it's a place to start. And there is very little data on it, at least from a site perspective. She was familiar with a classic study of Olympic athletes on the podium. Bronze medalists looked happier than silver medalists. The poor silver medalist were disappointed . I almost won a gold. The bronze medalist felt lucky. At least I got a medal. Emily wondered if something similar would hold for recession graduates. I found that people who graduated when the economy was doing worse, even though they were 10 or 15 or even 20 years out of those initial experiences, they were more satisfied with their current job than people who graduated in good economic times. At some of the sounds like good news, provided we can get reemployed, it seems like your data would suggest we're going to be happier with our jobs and more likely to appreciate them. Yeah, this is the first surprise people who start their careers in a recession may feel less entitled to the perfect job and more grateful to be employed. I don't mean to diminish the very serious and real obstacles that people who are graduating, but any recession face, but that there may be sort of this long term silver lining if you take your silver lining of people being more satisfied with their jobs. I worry that that's going to open the door for leaders to exploit them, that people who might have exited completely abusive or toxic workplace will stay because they say, hey, I'm lucky to have a job. Is that a risk? Absolutely. I worry about that, too. You may be at risk of tolerating circumstances which you wouldn't tolerate if you would come of age in better economic times. And why does it last? I'm thinking about the common finding that we adapt pretty quickly to our circumstances and start to get used to them. So why in 10 or 15 or 20 years after the recession is over, am I still thankful for having a job? Usually when people get their first jobs, it's in this period of life called the impressionable years. Most people are beginning to forge an identity outside of their families and their communities and trying to figure out their place in the world. And attitudes tend to be quite malleable during this period. What's going on in the world, whether economically, politically, culturally, tends to help shape those attitudes in ways that mirror what's happening at that moment. And after this critical period, attitudes don't tend to change that much. The indelible mark of the recession doesn't just affect us individually. It can have a meaningful impact on leaders and end up shaping entire organizations. It's very difficult for people who are graduating recessions to avoid kind of the humbling adversity that that type of environment presents. This brings us to a second surprise and some more long term good news despite the short term headwinds in my data. I find that people who come of age in recessions tend to be less narcissistic in terms of how they pay themselves versus how their top leaders within their company are paid. Those who come of age in recessions and then become leaders of organizations are less entitled knowing what it's like to struggle. These CEOs seem to care more for employees and behave less selfishly. They become proactive about taking responsibility. In one study, Emily discovered that CEOs who launched their careers in a recession were less likely to backdate their stock options to maximize their value. In other words, they were less likely to cheat, which is possibly the opposite of what you'd expect from a person who came of age while struggling. The people who tend to cheat are actually the people who are doing really well. A lot of cheating comes from entitlement or a belief that somebody deserves a better outcome or that nobody will notice. And I'll get a. So when you look into your crystal ball, then I don't want one of those, I beg to differ based on your findings in 20 or 30 years when people who are just starting out their career become CEOs. Does that mean we're going to see more servant leaders, more givers than takers? I would certainly hope so, based on what we've seen in the past. There are some reasons for optimism in the long run, the chaos we live through can make people stronger and better in a very real way in terms of how they mitigate the uncertainty associated with bad economic times. One, I think very positive way is through connecting with other people. This tendency for connectivity brings us to one last surprise from Emily's studies. During moments of uncertainty, but especially economic uncertainty, we tend to rethink our relationships with others. We become less individualistic and more civically minded. Emily has found an ingenious way to measure that through pop music. When we're struggling through bad economic times, we're drawn to different lyrics in popular American music, you're more likely to see first person plural pronouns like we us. Whereas in really good economic times, you see a lot of first person pronouns like me, mine I when you think of what's often called the greatest generation, the generation that came of age either in the Great Depression or World War Two, it's been argued again and again that this is the most civically minded generation. I do think we will see that going forward in the current generation. Another way, Emily measured individualism was by looking at Social Security data to see what parents name their kids during good and bad economic times. Emily found that when the economy is doing well, parents are more likely to give their kids unique names. I'm looking at you. Blue Ivy, when the economy is struggling, parents choose from a smaller set of more common names, which are often biblical names. It used to be in the 1950s when out of 15 boys would receive the most common name. Fast forward to 2013. And now it's one out of seventy five boys receive the most common name of their birth year, if you take this idea of increasing communal orientation, decreasing individualism seriously, would you also anticipate that we're going to see more caring and more supportive work relationships in the next couple of decades? The findings that I have looked at suggests that, yes, right. To the extent that people are less narcissistic, they would also manifest in positive ways in the interpersonal level. We can all agree that recessions are terrible in the short term for so many reasons. But in the long term, having experienced their own struggles, leaders in the future may be less entitled, more honest and more caring toward employees. And in the meantime, we all may be more community focused. But during a recession, there's a darker side to this. It really depends on who your community is. There tends to be greater fondness for people within one's own group and often, not always, but often that comes at the expense of how people perceive and treat people who are not a part of their anger. Xenophobia is higher. Treatment of immigrants is worse. All these different manifestations of prejudice. The evidence shows that recessions have unequal effects along racial lines. You know, the wage gap between black and white workers, well, Emily found that it grows during recessions. She also discovered that recessions change people's attitudes about race. Her research shows that white people are more likely to report that inequality between races is natural and normal in the wake of a recession. We need to understand how to overcome this ingroup bias and broaden people's circles of concern to motivate them to care about helping those who have been most disadvantaged. Dismantling these biases is so important that we'll be devoting two episodes to it this season. Stay tuned. When you hit turbulence, it can be hard to see the way forward, it can help to look backward. What we see when we do that is that the lessons we learn in these hard times will shape our jobs and our cultures for the long haul. Some of those effects are negative and we have to be vigilant to counteract. Some of them are surprisingly positive. A glimmer of light up ahead. We also see that in the bumpiest or most chaotic moments are connections with each other are more important than ever, and it's up to us to be proactive about not only reaching out to our networks, but expanding them. If we're thoughtful about it, we have the opportunity to stick the landing, to come through turbulence, more open, more honest and more connected than before. Next time on work life and also it's exhausting. Oh, my God. Sometimes I just want to agree to disagree or don't agree to disagree. The keys to solving conflicts at work and at home are often hiding in plain sight workplaces hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Alby's creditcard, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Kaieda, Chris Rubenstein, Michelle Quinn, Bambam Chang and Adam Thielen. This episode was produced by Joe Angelena. Our show is mixed by Require Our Fact Checkers. Paul Dabic Original Music by Hartsdale Sue and Alison Layton Brown had stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios special thanks to our sponsors linked in Logitech, Morgan Stanley, S&P and Verizon for their research, thanks to teams including Beristain Threat, Rigidity, Sharon Parker and Proactivity Connie Weinberg on the job search. Brett Lyons on disclosing stigmatized identities. Jamie Pennebaker on forming a story. Sue Ashford on Proactiv feedback seeking and job insecurity. Mark Granovetter on Weeks's Tarnya met in a narrowing versus broadening networks. Hudson sessions on side Hustle's Rick Priced on job loss and Lisa Kahn and how recessions affect careers. As brilliant as this is, I think you're slipping because I just Googled myself and there was not an ad by you to be on my podcast and maybe I'm getting complacent.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
morgan stanley 7
full time 4
bad economic 4
economic times 4
airline industry 3
long term 3
york city 3
long time 3
sharon pressler 2
adam grant 2
feel powerless 2
time job 2
coffee cart 2
research shows 2
job loss 2
people graduating 2
good economic 2
silver lining 2
short term 2
civically minded 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
bad economic times 2


Important Words


  1. aaron
  2. absolutely
  3. abusive
  4. access
  5. account
  6. acquaintances
  7. action
  8. ad
  9. adam
  10. adapt
  11. adapting
  12. address
  13. ads
  14. adulthood
  15. adults
  16. advance
  17. adversity
  18. advertising
  19. advice
  20. affect
  21. age
  22. agency
  23. agree
  24. air
  25. airline
  26. airlines
  27. airplane
  28. airplanes
  29. alison
  30. allowing
  31. altogether
  32. amazed
  33. amazing
  34. american
  35. angela
  36. angelena
  37. angelo
  38. anger
  39. annoy
  40. annoying
  41. anticipate
  42. anxiety
  43. anymore
  44. application
  45. applied
  46. architect
  47. argued
  48. articles
  49. ashford
  50. asset
  51. athletes
  52. atlantic
  53. attendants
  54. attitudes
  55. attract
  56. auto
  57. aviation
  58. avoid
  59. avoiding
  60. backdate
  61. bad
  62. balances
  63. ball
  64. bambam
  65. bank
  66. bars
  67. based
  68. basically
  69. beg
  70. beginning
  71. behave
  72. behavior
  73. belief
  74. beristain
  75. bianche
  76. bias
  77. biases
  78. biblical
  79. big
  80. biggest
  81. billion
  82. bills
  83. birth
  84. bit
  85. black
  86. block
  87. blue
  88. blueprints
  89. body
  90. boom
  91. boost
  92. bottom
  93. box
  94. boy
  95. boys
  96. break
  97. breakfast
  98. brett
  99. brilliant
  100. brings
  101. broaden
  102. broadened
  103. broadening
  104. broader
  105. bronze
  106. brother
  107. brought
  108. brown
  109. brownsville
  110. bubble
  111. buckin
  112. buckle
  113. build
  114. building
  115. built
  116. bull
  117. bumpiest
  118. bunch
  119. burger
  120. business
  121. bust
  122. buyouts
  123. california
  124. call
  125. callbacks
  126. called
  127. canopy
  128. captain
  129. care
  130. career
  131. careers
  132. caring
  133. cars
  134. cart
  135. cast
  136. casting
  137. catastrophic
  138. central
  139. ceo
  140. ceos
  141. cfos
  142. chang
  143. change
  144. changed
  145. changing
  146. chaos
  147. chaotic
  148. charge
  149. charting
  150. cheat
  151. cheating
  152. check
  153. checkers
  154. checks
  155. child
  156. chocolate
  157. choose
  158. chose
  159. chosen
  160. chris
  161. circle
  162. circles
  163. circumstance
  164. circumstances
  165. city
  166. civically
  167. class
  168. classic
  169. clever
  170. click
  171. clorox
  172. closed
  173. coaches
  174. coaching
  175. cockpit
  176. coffee
  177. cold
  178. colin
  179. colleague
  180. colleagues
  181. collect
  182. collective
  183. college
  184. color
  185. coming
  186. commitment
  187. common
  188. communal
  189. communications
  190. communities
  191. community
  192. company
  193. complacent
  194. complete
  195. completely
  196. compounded
  197. concealing
  198. concern
  199. conditions
  200. confidence
  201. conflicts
  202. confronting
  203. connected
  204. connecting
  205. connection
  206. connections
  207. connectivity
  208. connie
  209. constanza
  210. constrained
  211. continue
  212. continued
  213. contribute
  214. control
  215. controlling
  216. coolest
  217. core
  218. correctional
  219. counter
  220. counteract
  221. couple
  222. coveted
  223. covid
  224. crafting
  225. create
  226. credit
  227. creditcard
  228. cried
  229. critical
  230. crystal
  231. culturally
  232. culture
  233. cultures
  234. cup
  235. current
  236. customers
  237. dabic
  238. dad
  239. dallas
  240. dan
  241. dark
  242. darker
  243. data
  244. dealt
  245. dear
  246. decade
  247. decades
  248. decided
  249. decisions
  250. decreasing
  251. deeply
  252. degree
  253. degrees
  254. dejected
  255. delivery
  256. demand
  257. demonstrates
  258. demoted
  259. depends
  260. depression
  261. describe
  262. deserves
  263. designer
  264. desperate
  265. destroys
  266. devoting
  267. differ
  268. difficult
  269. digital
  270. diminish
  271. direct
  272. direction
  273. directors
  274. disabilities
  275. disability
  276. disadvantage
  277. disadvantaged
  278. disadvantages
  279. disagree
  280. disappointed
  281. disclosing
  282. discovered
  283. discriminate
  284. dismantling
  285. distant
  286. disturbance
  287. division
  288. docket
  289. donations
  290. doomed
  291. door
  292. dotcom
  293. downsized
  294. dramatic
  295. dramatically
  296. draw
  297. drawn
  298. driven
  299. dropped
  300. earlier
  301. earn
  302. earth
  303. economic
  304. economically
  305. economy
  306. ecosystem
  307. edith
  308. effective
  309. effects
  310. elephant
  311. email
  312. embedded
  313. emily
  314. emory
  315. emphasis
  316. employed
  317. employees
  318. employers
  319. encounter
  320. ended
  321. engagement
  322. engaging
  323. engine
  324. entire
  325. entitled
  326. entitlement
  327. environment
  328. episode
  329. episodes
  330. ercan
  331. erin
  332. estimate
  333. eventually
  334. evidence
  335. excited
  336. excites
  337. excluded
  338. excuses
  339. executive
  340. exert
  341. exhausting
  342. exited
  343. expand
  344. expanding
  345. expect
  346. expectations
  347. expense
  348. experienced
  349. experiences
  350. experiment
  351. expert
  352. experts
  353. exploit
  354. exploring
  355. expressing
  356. extent
  357. extraordinary
  358. face
  359. faced
  360. fact
  361. fallout
  362. familiar
  363. families
  364. family
  365. fascinating
  366. fast
  367. favorably
  368. favorite
  369. feedback
  370. feel
  371. feeling
  372. feels
  373. fell
  374. felt
  375. field
  376. fighter
  377. figure
  378. filtered
  379. finally
  380. finance
  381. financial
  382. financially
  383. find
  384. finding
  385. findings
  386. fine
  387. fish
  388. fit
  389. fix
  390. flight
  391. florida
  392. flown
  393. fly
  394. flying
  395. focus
  396. focused
  397. focusing
  398. folks
  399. follow
  400. fondness
  401. food
  402. foot
  403. force
  404. forcing
  405. forecast
  406. foremost
  407. forge
  408. form
  409. formal
  410. forming
  411. fourth
  412. freeze
  413. front
  414. full
  415. furloughing
  416. future
  417. gap
  418. generally
  419. generation
  420. gentlemen
  421. give
  422. givers
  423. giving
  424. glimmer
  425. global
  426. globally
  427. glut
  428. god
  429. gold
  430. good
  431. google
  432. googled
  433. googling
  434. graduate
  435. graduated
  436. graduates
  437. graduating
  438. granovetter
  439. grant
  440. grappling
  441. grateful
  442. gratitude
  443. gravity
  444. great
  445. greater
  446. greatest
  447. grinding
  448. group
  449. grow
  450. growing
  451. grows
  452. guess
  453. guide
  454. guys
  455. hamilton
  456. hand
  457. hang
  458. happen
  459. happened
  460. happening
  461. happier
  462. hard
  463. harder
  464. hartsdale
  465. haul
  466. head
  467. headquarters
  468. headwind
  469. headwinds
  470. health
  471. hear
  472. heard
  473. hearing
  474. heart
  475. helped
  476. helping
  477. helps
  478. hesitant
  479. hey
  480. hiding
  481. higher
  482. highest
  483. hired
  484. hiring
  485. historical
  486. hit
  487. hold
  488. home
  489. homepage
  490. honest
  491. honey
  492. hong
  493. hope
  494. hoped
  495. horizon
  496. horns
  497. horrible
  498. hosted
  499. hudson
  500. huge
  501. humbling
  502. hustles
  503. idea
  504. ideas
  505. identifying
  506. identities
  507. identity
  508. illegal
  509. imaginable
  510. immigrants
  511. impact
  512. implications
  513. important
  514. impressionable
  515. improve
  516. incarcerated
  517. include
  518. includes
  519. including
  520. increases
  521. increasing
  522. incredible
  523. indelible
  524. individual
  525. individualism
  526. individualistic
  527. individually
  528. industry
  529. inequality
  530. ingenious
  531. ingroup
  532. inherently
  533. initial
  534. initiative
  535. insane
  536. insecurity
  537. instinct
  538. instincts
  539. institution
  540. instructor
  541. interact
  542. interested
  543. interesting
  544. interpersonal
  545. interrupt
  546. interview
  547. interviewed
  548. interviewers
  549. interviews
  550. issues
  551. ivy
  552. jacksonville
  553. jam
  554. jamie
  555. jets
  556. job
  557. jobs
  558. joe
  559. john
  560. journey
  561. judge
  562. kahn
  563. kaieda
  564. keeping
  565. key
  566. keys
  567. kid
  568. kids
  569. kind
  570. kinds
  571. knew
  572. knowing
  573. kong
  574. ladies
  575. laid
  576. land
  577. landing
  578. large
  579. lasting
  580. lasts
  581. late
  582. launched
  583. layton
  584. lead
  585. leaders
  586. learn
  587. learned
  588. learning
  589. leaving
  590. left
  591. lens
  592. lessons
  593. level
  594. life
  595. lifetime
  596. light
  597. lighter
  598. likes
  599. limitations
  600. lines
  601. lining
  602. linked
  603. lisa
  604. list
  605. listening
  606. literally
  607. live
  608. lived
  609. livelihood
  610. lives
  611. lock
  612. logitech
  613. long
  614. looked
  615. loss
  616. lost
  617. lot
  618. lots
  619. love
  620. loved
  621. lucky
  622. lyons
  623. lyrics
  624. mackey
  625. major
  626. making
  627. malleable
  628. manage
  629. manifest
  630. manifestations
  631. march
  632. marital
  633. mark
  634. marketing
  635. mask
  636. masks
  637. mass
  638. massive
  639. matter
  640. maximize
  641. mcglaughlin
  642. mclaughlin
  643. meaningful
  644. means
  645. meant
  646. measure
  647. measured
  648. mechanic
  649. medal
  650. medalist
  651. medalists
  652. media
  653. meet
  654. member
  655. members
  656. mental
  657. mentoring
  658. mess
  659. met
  660. michelle
  661. mike
  662. millionaire
  663. millions
  664. minded
  665. minds
  666. minute
  667. mirror
  668. mistakes
  669. mitigate
  670. mixed
  671. mock
  672. mom
  673. moment
  674. moments
  675. money
  676. moon
  677. morgan
  678. morning
  679. mortgage
  680. motivate
  681. motivation
  682. move
  683. moving
  684. music
  685. nagging
  686. named
  687. names
  688. narcissistic
  689. narrative
  690. narrow
  691. narrowing
  692. narrowly
  693. nasty
  694. natural
  695. navigate
  696. navigating
  697. nearby
  698. negative
  699. nerve
  700. net
  701. network
  702. networks
  703. newborn
  704. news
  705. normal
  706. notable
  707. notice
  708. nugget
  709. number
  710. observed
  711. obstacles
  712. occasionally
  713. ocean
  714. offenders
  715. offense
  716. offer
  717. offered
  718. office
  719. olympic
  720. ominous
  721. open
  722. opening
  723. operate
  724. opportunities
  725. opportunity
  726. optimism
  727. optimization
  728. options
  729. order
  730. orders
  731. organization
  732. organizational
  733. organizations
  734. organized
  735. orientation
  736. original
  737. outcome
  738. outcomes
  739. overcome
  740. owning
  741. paid
  742. pain
  743. pairing
  744. pandemic
  745. parents
  746. parker
  747. part
  748. partnerships
  749. party
  750. pass
  751. passed
  752. passing
  753. patch
  754. pattern
  755. patterns
  756. paul
  757. pause
  758. pay
  759. paying
  760. peek
  761. pennebaker
  762. people
  763. perceive
  764. percent
  765. perfect
  766. performance
  767. period
  768. person
  769. personal
  770. perspective
  771. phoenix
  772. physical
  773. pilot
  774. pilots
  775. pineapple
  776. pity
  777. pivoting
  778. place
  779. plain
  780. plan
  781. planning
  782. play
  783. plural
  784. podcast
  785. podium
  786. politically
  787. pool
  788. poor
  789. pop
  790. pops
  791. popular
  792. position
  793. positive
  794. possibly
  795. potentially
  796. powerless
  797. prejudice
  798. premier
  799. prescreening
  800. presents
  801. pressler
  802. pressor
  803. pretty
  804. preventing
  805. priced
  806. principle
  807. prison
  808. proactiv
  809. proactive
  810. proactively
  811. proactivity
  812. problem
  813. problems
  814. process
  815. produced
  816. professor
  817. profound
  818. profoundly
  819. program
  820. programs
  821. project
  822. promising
  823. pronouns
  824. properly
  825. prospective
  826. psychological
  827. psychologist
  828. psychologists
  829. psychology
  830. pulled
  831. pushing
  832. puts
  833. question
  834. quickly
  835. quinn
  836. race
  837. races
  838. racial
  839. radio
  840. raising
  841. rallied
  842. rate
  843. rated
  844. reach
  845. reaching
  846. reacting
  847. ready
  848. real
  849. realize
  850. reasons
  851. receive
  852. recession
  853. recessions
  854. recruit
  855. recruiters
  856. redesigned
  857. reduces
  858. reemployed
  859. reflection
  860. reformed
  861. reframe
  862. regulars
  863. relationships
  864. relief
  865. remember
  866. report
  867. require
  868. research
  869. researchers
  870. resourceful
  871. respect
  872. response
  873. responsibilities
  874. responsibility
  875. result
  876. resume
  877. resumes
  878. rethink
  879. retire
  880. retired
  881. retirement
  882. reveals
  883. rick
  884. ride
  885. rigidity
  886. risk
  887. risks
  888. role
  889. roles
  890. room
  891. rough
  892. routines
  893. row
  894. rubenstein
  895. rudder
  896. rug
  897. run
  898. running
  899. résumé
  900. sadly
  901. safe
  902. satisfied
  903. save
  904. scale
  905. school
  906. scott
  907. screening
  908. search
  909. searches
  910. searching
  911. season
  912. seat
  913. security
  914. seeking
  915. selecting
  916. selfishly
  917. sending
  918. sense
  919. seo
  920. series
  921. servant
  922. sessions
  923. set
  924. setback
  925. setbacks
  926. seventy
  927. sex
  928. shadow
  929. shape
  930. shaping
  931. sharon
  932. short
  933. show
  934. showcase
  935. shown
  936. shows
  937. shut
  938. sick
  939. side
  940. sight
  941. signal
  942. significant
  943. silver
  944. similar
  945. siphoned
  946. sister
  947. site
  948. sitting
  949. situation
  950. skills
  951. sky
  952. slipping
  953. small
  954. smaller
  955. smile
  956. smith
  957. smooth
  958. snowballed
  959. social
  960. society
  961. solving
  962. son
  963. sort
  964. sounds
  965. southwest
  966. spanning
  967. speak
  968. speaking
  969. special
  970. specific
  971. spend
  972. spent
  973. sponsoring
  974. sponsors
  975. spot
  976. sprang
  977. square
  978. standard
  979. stanley
  980. stars
  981. start
  982. started
  983. starting
  984. starts
  985. state
  986. station
  987. status
  988. stay
  989. step
  990. stepping
  991. stewardess
  992. stick
  993. stigmatized
  994. stint
  995. stock
  996. stop
  997. stopped
  998. stories
  999. storm
  1000. story
  1001. strain
  1002. strange
  1003. strangers
  1004. strategy
  1005. street
  1006. stroke
  1007. strong
  1008. stronger
  1009. struck
  1010. struggle
  1011. struggles
  1012. struggling
  1013. students
  1014. studied
  1015. studies
  1016. studios
  1017. study
  1018. stuff
  1019. subject
  1020. submit
  1021. substitute
  1022. success
  1023. successfully
  1024. suck
  1025. sue
  1026. suffer
  1027. suffered
  1028. suggest
  1029. suggests
  1030. support
  1031. supporting
  1032. supportive
  1033. surely
  1034. surprise
  1035. surprised
  1036. surprising
  1037. surprisingly
  1038. tables
  1039. takers
  1040. talk
  1041. talking
  1042. targeted
  1043. targeting
  1044. tarnya
  1045. taught
  1046. teacher
  1047. teaching
  1048. team
  1049. teams
  1050. technology
  1051. ted
  1052. teenager
  1053. telling
  1054. tend
  1055. tendency
  1056. term
  1057. terms
  1058. terrible
  1059. texas
  1060. thankful
  1061. thielen
  1062. thinking
  1063. thought
  1064. thoughtful
  1065. thousands
  1066. threat
  1067. threats
  1068. ties
  1069. tight
  1070. tilting
  1071. time
  1072. times
  1073. today
  1074. told
  1075. tolerance
  1076. tolerate
  1077. tolerating
  1078. tools
  1079. top
  1080. totally
  1081. tough
  1082. toxic
  1083. track
  1084. transition
  1085. transmitter
  1086. travel
  1087. treat
  1088. treatment
  1089. true
  1090. trust
  1091. tuned
  1092. turbulence
  1093. turbulent
  1094. turned
  1095. turns
  1096. twenty
  1097. type
  1098. typical
  1099. uncertainty
  1100. uncle
  1101. undermines
  1102. understand
  1103. understood
  1104. unequal
  1105. unexpected
  1106. unheard
  1107. unique
  1108. university
  1109. unstable
  1110. upheaval
  1111. upside
  1112. utilize
  1113. varying
  1114. vendors
  1115. venmo
  1116. verizon
  1117. videos
  1118. vigilant
  1119. virtual
  1120. wage
  1121. wait
  1122. waiting
  1123. wake
  1124. walking
  1125. wanted
  1126. war
  1127. watch
  1128. ways
  1129. weak
  1130. wearing
  1131. web
  1132. website
  1133. websites
  1134. week
  1135. weigh
  1136. weight
  1137. weinberg
  1138. wheelchair
  1139. white
  1140. wider
  1141. wife
  1142. wind
  1143. wipes
  1144. wisdom
  1145. woman
  1146. won
  1147. wondered
  1148. words
  1149. work
  1150. worked
  1151. workers
  1152. working
  1153. workplace
  1154. workplaces
  1155. works
  1156. world
  1157. worried
  1158. worry
  1159. worse
  1160. wow
  1161. wracking
  1162. wreck
  1163. wrongly
  1164. xenophobia
  1165. yeah
  1166. year
  1167. years
  1168. york
  1169. young
  1170. youtube