Handling Challenging Personalities at Work with Tessa West

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and forty. I'm going to be interviewing Tessa West about her new book Jerks at Work. So if you have ever dealt with a difficult colleague, this episode is for you. She has some practical tips on how to manage it and not necessarily have to leave what could be a great job. How to deal with these people. So we're going to, you know, talk about something different. We are not going to be talking about Jerks at Work in the introduction here. Instead, we're talking about a question we sometimes get from people about our creative process. So how do you keep coming up with ideas? Whether for podcasts, for blog post for things like that. So, Sarah, what do you do? What is your creative process? When you suggested this as a topic, I was like, what, First of all, I'm not a creative person, and second of all, I do not have a process. But then I was like, well, for a non creative person, I do create a lot of content in various realms. So I don't know. Maybe I just have to think about what my definition of creative actually is. I do come up with a lot of ideas around this podcast, although a lot of them come from somebody else, like a blog commenter that has something that makes me think, or just something that happens in life, like our recent Disney episode. I don't know that there was that much creativity. But then when you sit down and do it, you come up with all kinds of ideas and connections, And again, I guess that's creativity. But I hadn't really thought about it that way, So I guess I don't have a process per se. But having routines where I sit down and generate content and doing that regularly I think helps break creativity or kind of strengthen that muscle. And I've generally sit down and blog like almost every morning, so I guess maybe just kind of out of habit more than anything else. Deadlines definitely helped me. If I know we have a podcast episode coming up, all of a sudden, I can come up with more ideas for future episodes. I was listening to another podcast recently and they were talking about how they plan all their episodes for the year, and I'm like, wow, that is amazing, but like, I just like it's not appealing to me. I like to come up with, like what I'm excited to talk about at that juncture of life. So that's more how I do things with Laura for best of both worlds. And then finally I'll say I am a proponent of the like just not trying to be perfect. I mean that is why I'm comfortable posting a blog post with basically zero editing and have about a twenty to twenty five minute timeline where I churn those out because I feel like I've shared a lot of cool things and if I were to take the time to make a perfect post every week or something, A, I don't think that would be as fun and B I just don't think I would be able to share as much, so I'm a proponent over like just like bad first draft and then maybe just share it with the world if it's just a blog and it's a low stakes kind of a publication. Yeah, Definitely more work leads to better work. I think for most people of volume strategy is the way to go. Like, the more you create, the more ideas you come up with, partly because you have more time that you're sitting there thinking about ideas, and as you have that time, the ideas will start coming to you. And as you put stuff out in the world, people react to it and then you get more ideas from that. Everything does get easier with practice. Yeah. I also love the idea of you know, just creating stuff and then getting feedback on it, and even if you're not posting it publicly, like getting a few friends to look at something and telling you what they think will help. Having lots of inputs, like the more thoughtful stuff you were reading or listening to, the more connections you will forage. And then having some way to capture ideas like if an idea comes to you for a blog post or something, Sarah or you are you know, a podcast idea, well you'll sometimes like email me right, like, just you know, shoot off an email and same thing here, I'll shoot off an email or I'll email myself like I've emailed myself all kinds of ideas so that you can capture those and then you know, when you have a time, you're sitting down to plan out stuff you can do and talking to other people, collaborating. You know, good ideas come from working on that. You're you're collaborating with people on some research projects, aren't you. Yeah, I collaborate with people all day long. Yeah, My life is a collaboration. So there you go. Yeah, the more people you talk to about your projects, the more stuff you come up with. And you can create groups to workshop each other's stuff even if you are not and hopefully those people will want be wonderful and they are not jerks at work, which is what we're going to be talking about in the main section of this So I'm going to be interviewing Tessa West here about her book Jerks at Work, and she's going to tell us how we can deal with them. Well, I am so excited to welcome Tessa West to the program. Tessa, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So, I'm a social psychology professor at New York University. Basically what that means is I study how everyday people interact with each other and negotiate, handle tough problems, deal with anxiety and these sorts of things. And you know, that's what I do for most of my job, But I also do a lot of work consulting and helping people who are dealing with difficult problems at work, everything from brand new employees to bosses who've been doing this for thirty years plus. Wonderful. And your brand new book is called Jerks at Work. So we saw that title. I'm like, hmmm, not that any of us have ever had to deal with such things, but what drew you to this topic? Enjoyed the story in your book about actually rearranging your schedule once so you didn't have to run into a particular jerk in the bathroom. Yeah, I think jerks are these kind of funny people that at least the jerks I'm talking about in my book are really just the sort of low level daily people that we have conflict with that they don't do anything that's bad enough that we can can usually complain about them to human resources or take any formal action against them. But their behaviors make us miserable at work, and it's actually that low level conflict that stresses us out and really contributes to health problems and psychological stress, and we end up taking a lot of it at home with us and taking it out on our kids and our spouses. So I wanted to write a book that just gets at these daily conflict that we have. And from my perspective, I think we've all dealt with jerks at work. We all have the potential to even be one under the right circumstances, So it could be useful to just learn some kind of take them strategies of what to do. Yeah, and your book is divided into kind of a taxonomy of the various that one might encounter. I wonder if you could just, you know, walk us through a few of these, just a sentence or so about them, so we know what we what we might be looking for as we are on our safari trying to find they to label your jerks y, Yes, exactly. I talk about seven different types in this book, and I'll just give you kind of a brief thing about each one. So the first is the kiss up kick downer, So this is that person who your boss loves. They're very successful at work, but they torture you and everyone at the same level is you are even beneath them, without ever getting caught. The next is the credit stealer, so this is that person who takes credit for all of your hard work and your good ideas. And the next is the bulldozer, the person who manages to just always have their voice heard. They talk over people. If they don't like an outcome of a group decision, they go behind the scenes to talk to the boss or the boss's boss to get their way. Next, we have the free writer. So that's that person with all the charm in the world who just gets away with doing nothing and it's super frustrating for those of us who are very conscientious at work. And then we have three different types of bosses. So the first is the micromanager. This is actually the most common type of boss. You know, we're used to having bosses who pay attention to detail, but these folks are obsessed over every little detailed no matter how irrelevant it is, and they kind of do this to everybody and drive us crazy and then we have the neglectful boss, who's kind of on the opposite end of that continuum. So they tend to just be overworked and overburdened. Sometimes they panic and they show up and they micromanage you at the last moment just to feel like they can get some control back, but most of the time they're just nowhere to be found. And then lastly, the gaslighter. So this is that very difficult type of person who lies with the intent of deceiving on a grand scale, and they cut you off socially and they make it very hard for you to kind of challenge their perspective. They create a completely alternative reality for you at work. Yeah, so it sounds like I'm getting tense just listening to this. That's not triggering, right, I know. But we're going to talk through some strategies for how to deal with a few of these. So I wanted to start with the credit stealer. So, you know, lots of people have been in a work environment where somebody else is taking the credit for the work we do, and obviously this can be very demoralizing. So what do you recommend people do in this situation. It's a really hard question to answer. I think, you know, when we think about credit stealing, there's a lot of things that contribute to it that we need to understand to figure out what the solutions should be. So the first is, if you're in a group where credit stealing is happening, or what's happening to you, is there a system accountability where everyone just kind of knows who contributed what, And the best way to create that system is to write it down immediately after you have a meeting, have this kind of rotating role of notes taking to get everyone on the same page. The next important thing to do, and this is actually critical with remote work and hybrid work, is there's a lot of what we call invisible labor that's going on. People are doing jobs, and actually this disproportionately affects women. They're doing work that go unseen that your boss, your coworkers might not even know about. The only person who knows you're doing it is your credit stealer. And so when you don't actually tell anyone you're doing this work, it's easy to steal credit for something that you were never going to get credit for in the first place. And then I think kind of another step, and this is more of an offensive strategy is learning how to be heard it work, learning how to have voice, and you need to have that going into the meeting so that credit stealers are just less likely to actually get away with it. And actually the best way to have voice at work is to develop social connections, to be well networked, to know what strategies work in a room with a certain type of leadership. You know, what is the kind of most persuasive strategies that certain leaders like to hear from people. If they don't like a racist strategies, don't do those things. And really also kind of know insider tricks like when are the best times to actually hold these meetings when leaders are going to be the most open to hearing from you, So you can kind of learn these strategies of being seen as a leader, having voice going into the meeting, so that if someone tries to do a credit for you, it just kind of bounces off of you because you automatically soak it up like a sponge. People just automatically attach your idea to you instead of you having to fight to keep it the entire time. Yeah, very important, and getting that sense of social connection at work is critical. I think one of your lines is that what is it that having friends at work is the antidote for jerks at work? Yeah, I think you know, we're all missing the social connection at work, but in ways we don't even realize it's affecting our careers. So, you know, not just a best friend that you can talk to about your problems, but also well connected people who are a bit at arms length, who can actually connect you to other targets of jerks. You know, even people who've left the company and dealt with this person in the past. You know, my job, I was just actually talking to the person who runs it, and you know, the people who fix our computer is actually the most knowledgeable about people's personalities. But like people in academia, the professors sort of ignore them. And it's crazy to me because there's super well connected and they're actually outside of our social networks, and so they're often people like that are often the best to go to to actually kind of learn information about how to get ahead, how to deal with these difficult people exactly. All right, Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with Tessa West talking about jerks at work. So I am back with Tessa West, who is talking about her brand new book Jerks at Work and how we can deal with difficult people in the professional environment. We were just talking about credit stealers and how to deal with them. How about the free writers. I think a lot of our listeners have encountered. We're all diligent sorts here, We've done a lot of extra work over the years. So the free rider is a common problem, right, It's absolutely common. In fact, there's some great new social science research showing that this problem's really gotten out of control in the era of remote work. And even if you confront a free writer and this will kind of get into the strategies of what you do. Even if you confront them with hard evidence of their free writing and proof that everyone in the group thinks they've done it, they will just deny it till the day they die. It's very hard to get people to actually even kind of fess up to this type of behavior. And you know, honestly, these folks are really smart. They tend to target teams that are full of conscientious team players who are actually willing to pick up the slack for them, and sometimes pick up the slack so well that they actually do better than teams that don't have free writers, so they can actually kind of accidentally benefit from them. And if there's any kind of collective rewarding involved with the team, they'll also take advantage of those teams because they're going to benefit no matter what they do. The team is a collective is going to get rewarded. And I'd say on top of that, we're usually dealing with charismatic, fun people that everybody actually likes, and so, you know, if these people have terrible personalities, I think we kick them out of our groups really early. But they're fun and they have gossip, and they can get the best dinner reservations, and we actually enjoy their company, and so they get away with slacking off and then doing the veneer of work, like you know, doing the group presentation after everyone's been working on it for thirty days. That just kind of looks like they're contributing, but in reality, they've just spent five minutes doing it. So what do we do about these people? You had a suggestion about fairness checks, which I thought was a great idea for how we could sort of structure teamwork in general. That's right, I mean, I think it feels weird sometimes to lay a bunch of rules down on your teams, especially if you like each other, you get along well, all these kinds of things, things seem to be going well. But fairness checks are very easy to do, and you can do them multiple times throughout the group. What I like to do is ask kind of two sets of questions. The first is what did everybody agree to do at the beginning of the group meeting? You know, what work has everybody agreed to do? And then instead of asking them if anyone's free writing, what you do instead is ask people if they did any work they didn't agree to do ahead of time. Because what free writers do is they actually they're pretty good at kind of breaking up their work and spreading it across equally across multiple people, so no one person feels the load. But if you're a boss or a manager or a team leader, what you'll see is over time, there'll be a pattern where everyone's kind of picking up a little bit of extra work, and you're able to get this information out without asking people to kind of tell on each other. It's just the discrepancy between what you agreed to do what you actually ended up doing. That can really help fish that out. Yeah, and I think people might be willing to point out that somebody else was doing extra work too, as a way to you know, you're not telling anyone, you're actually like lauding a coworker who just did extra work. But yet also is like book, which was by the way, if we go back to that original list that was on John's list and somehow that's exactly Mary doing it again. It's all about framing, right, So if you can like lift up someone who's been doing you know, extra work or invisible labor or whatever that is, instead of putting down a team member who honestly you probably actually like and or personally, then that actually can make it just kind of a much more comfortable thing to do. And then I think the other thing is just resist the temptation to actually confront them and tell them that you caught them, because they're already disengaged. Now you're just adding shame to the mix. They're going to really disengage, and you actually want to bring them back in by reminding them what you miss in the first place about them and kind of what can we do to get us all on the same page again? Awesome and then finally we wanted to talk about the bulldozer. So, the bulldozer somebody who's you know, pushing to get their way. And I think what many of our listeners may have encountered this in especially if you are newly into management or people's boss for the first time and you are managing somebody who is a bulldozer. I mean, what do you do about that situation? Yeah, so bulldozers tend to have power and status, so they get away with talking the most, talking the loudest, and interrupting the most in teams. You know, the best strategy for dealing with these folks isn't in the moment, it's planning ahead. So if you know you have a bulldozer, I mean, we've all been there where we know that if so and so shows up, we're not going to get anything done. God knows how many hours we're all going to be sitting here. You have to plan ahead of sort of who's going to be in charge of not interrupting or shutting down the bulldozer, but calling on others to be heard. So what you really need is someone to say, Okay, we've heard from John. Let's we haven't heard from you. Know, Laura or Maria or whoever else to kind of lift up the voices of others. I think that you have to get others to recognize that bulldozer, because it really does take a team to kind of shut that person down. And then I would also say that bulldozers are actually really good at kind of orchestrating relationships outside of the team and pulling levers of power that aren't just one level above them, but sometimes two or three levels, and so they have no problem kind of jumping rank to get what they want. So the team that's being bulldozed, if you find yourself kind of in an impasse all the time, you're going to have to do the same thing and find out who that person's going to behind the scenes to have your arguments heard. The number one strategy bulldozers use to shut stuff down is they criticize the process of decision making, So they make leaders question whether there is procedural justice, whether we talked enough about it, whether the decision was made too quickly. By questioning the process, it makes they make it look like they care about the group, but in reality, they just don't like the outcome, and they're justifying it by attacking the process, So just watch out for that strategy. Yeah. And is there a way to sort of reassert your own control over the situation if you are the manager of this person who on some level is like not really accepting the fact that you are their manager. Yeah. I mean this happens a lot to women in power because men get away with talking more and louder often. In fact, when women do it, it's seen through a very different light. A couple things that you can do are actually sort of ironically, when you make a point, you don't want to talk for longer. You want to actually make super short, very sort of terse points very early on in meetings. So I in my book, I talk about the martyin nem CO role. You kind of have thirty seconds to make a point, you know, then the light turns yellow. At that point, no one's listening to you at red. They're like the zoom screens minimize their shopping online. So you actually want to talk for a shorter period of time, and you want to do it early. And you also just kind of want to cert your leadership very early on in that meeting, sometimes over and over again. As a leader. You can do it by having new people introduce themselves or you know, start the meeting by talking about goals or agendas. Just doing that can actually really sort of help push the bulldozer off to the site so people don't see that person as the leader instead of you. Yeah, that's an interesting point about when people hear someone being assertive at the beginning of anything, they automatically assume that person is high status. Yeah, exactly, and you have to be that person. How hard is that stereotype to your own good? Yeah, you want to be that person. So does remote work change any of this? You know, at one point in your book you mentioned somebody who is a really bad, micromanaging boss, but who you know, was like too lazy to take the stairs. So they're targets were the people who are right around them as opposed to the employees on a different for it. And so I'm wondering, you know, like now that so many of us are working from our kitchen tables or the guest bedroom or whatever, like, does that make it easier to deal with jerks because you get some physical distance or is it harder because they're just like, you know, you can't turn it off and completely be away from them. Because your laptops by your bed. I mean, yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, smart jerks, those that actually have a lot of social skills, have found ways of really exploiting our current system to get away with their bad behavior. So micro managers, for example, they'll have no problem just going from email to text and they'll just text you all the time instead, and they actually get additional information that they didn't even get face to face, which is whether your text was delivered, so they can kind of spye on you even more. Is there even more top down control over you than when you were in person where they we could see that you're busy in a meeting and things like that. So some types of so are actually getting away with it. I would definitely say that credits dealers get away with it more because we do all this silent work. So dirks are very much still alive and well. But like you know, a virus, like you know, like the coronavirus, they can just adapt and mutate and become even better it's at their jobs than they were before. So certainly the dirt problem isn't going away. And I've seen you know, very creative instantiations of all of the dirks I've talked about in this hybrid world, they just figure out new ways to get away with it. They just don't share the new delta like they're more dangerous, but you know, they on the prost just you know, more prevalent, but less uh less less dangerous. Interesting questions. I don't know. But speaking of viruses and such, well, let's talk about healthy teams. Yeah, so, so what are some of the habits of healthy teams that you know, even if there is conflict, it is it is well managed, and so that any any inherent jerkiness that all of us might have because we are humans and could come out in certain circumstances, is just channeled toward good. That's a great question. I think what healthy teams tend to do is they they're kind of like a couple that make sure they always have date night even if things are going well. You know, it's maintenance. So there are clear consistent rules that everybody must follow. There's extremely clean kind of note keeping about who's done what, and if there's conflict, you know, small things that come up. And I talk a little bit about this in my conclusion, they handle it right then and there and when they actually bring up problems. They focus on specific behaviors, not on how they feel about it, and not on what that behavior says about the other person and what they're trying to do. And you know what their incentives are for, you know, trying to screw them or whatever. So I think healthy teams, Yes, they're full of go getters, they're conscientious, they have all that great stuff. Everybody gets along, but they also engage in these maintenance behaviors. You know that we see often people kind of relaxing on a little bit too much when they feel like there's flow and a crew, And I think we often kind of rationalize not keeping track of who said what, not keeping track of contributions, not making sure we have equal talk time for members when we feel like everybody trusts each other. And that's where you get these jerks that can kind of sneak in and then take advantage of these types of groups. Yeah, because everything seems to be going well, and if you're not, you know, doing this this maintenance, all of a sudden, you've gone six months with no date night, and yeah, and your roommates or exactly, well that's a different sort of jerk situation. But yeah, so Tessa, we always end with a love of the week, which is something that we are enjoying these days and and that is making our life good. So I can go first because it allows us to you to think about it. I'm really enjoying that my kids are using their pogo sticks. So it turns out that and you know, it can be done on your driveway, so you're not like trying to It's not like a bike, so you're going off, you know, and I have to worry about traffic or anything like that on your driveway. It also burns a ton of energy, and there's a very straightforward sense of competition, and you know, because if somebody got ten without falling off, then somebody else has to get twelve, and so then you're practicing and getting up to thirty four fifty. I don't know. Apparently there's a world record of like two hundred thousand jumps on a pogo stick. I don't Yeah, my kid actually has that world record book. I know what you're talking about. It's like, could I get that one? Could I get what that? We account for me? Like, well, probably not to two hundred thousand, but we'll see. How about you. That's great. I love that my kid, who's eight, has decided that playing basketball at the park is more interesting than watching Mister Beast on YouTube or playing Minecraft. You know, this is the first time in like two and a half years where playing outside has actually been kind of more appealing than playing on his iPad. It's normally like I have to bribe him. So, I mean, last weekend in New York, it was beautiful. We played for eight hours outside and it felt like a miracle. So I'm going to embrace it while I have it. It's just enough people are now at the park that it's like you can get a good game going. Yeah, and it's kind of like an eighties childhood. They're running me the little my childhood where just everyone's at the park or just you know, anyone can join the basketball. It's super nice and it's social and yeah, that's what I'm doing. That's wonderful. Well, that's when human action interaction goes well as a funny Now, I'm like, you guys actually like eye contact. You forgot toxic as it can well, Tessa, thanks so much for joining us. Where can our listeners find you? You can go to my website. Tessa westauthor, dot com. I have list of retailers there. I also have all my jerk at where quizzes that you can take and get immediate feedback of where you fall in these different categories as well as are you an effective ally, So that can be a fun one to take as well. That's exactly and hopefully we won't all find out that we are the jerks at work. Occasionally we probably are, all right, Well, Tessa, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you well, that was amazing. Lots of practical tips there. Our question and is another sort of work related one. This comes from a science professor at a research university who runs a big lab full of students who are working toward their PhD, post doc fellows and research scientists. She pays everyone's salary out of the research grants she gets for the lab, so she's basically their boss in a business, although it is under the auspices of a university. So that's how you can sort of have this mindset of what's going on here. So as she is managing people, I'm paraphrasing because she gave us more details, but just so we be a bit anonymous here. She meets with everyone in her lab three times per year to talk about professional and research goal setting. They review the prior semester's goals, see what has been accomplished, and set new goals accordingly. She sometimes does, you know, weekly group meetings where people discuss progress too. She's a vail for discussions. Basically the boss you want. She's amazing. Okay. So the problem is, she says, for some trainees this works great. The goal setting process is like intuitive. They meet with her, they set goals for the next time. When they come back, they have achieved those goals. They are ready to move on to new ones. She says, for others, it is clear that this process of goal setting meetings does not work. Despite my periodic reminders during each semester to review their goals and make sure they are making progress. I feel like these trainees find this a mostly useless or awkward exercise, maybe fee feeling like they're and then making no progress. It's not that these individuals aren't smart or capable or hardworking, but anecdotally they are less focused and productive and efficient in the lab, so fewer of their experiments tend to work out and result in published articles. She appreciates that not everyone works the same way. She values diversity of all forms, which means that there's also different work styles that she wants to welcome into her lab. Knows a lot of people are young. Obviously this is their first big job that's open ended. That doesn't you know, come with like this is what you do? You do X, Y or Z, Now did you do it? So she understands that that's an issue, But what are our suggestions for people who are either just getting into goal setting or for alternate accountability structures for people for whom this does not come naturally? So, Sarah, what do you think, I mean, you're working with a lot of residents who are making progress toward their goals too. Yes, although residency, so I've been in both places on the receiving end, residency is very structured. So it's like you're on this rotation and you're going to see these patients and at the end of the day you're gonna write the notes and like you can't really like not do it. Like However, in a research lab, and I've been in multiple research labs, I was not myself the world's best research trainee probably, I would say, although I did not have a boss. This amazing because I tended to work in whow I'm really digressing, but I tended to work in bigger labs where I didn't feel like there was that much time for this much mentorship. So I first want to applaud this person because oh my gosh, like this amount of attention is just awesome, and the fact that she is making an effort to like meet and have them set goals, like I just think that's amazing. But what I was getting at is like, if you are not getting a lot of structure, it's very easy to just become very lost in a research lab and maybe even just sort of like not be accomplishing much but then not knowing what else to do with your life, or like questioning should you even be there, but like now you're in inertia, and like I don't know, maybe that's what's going on with some of her trainees. I also found myself thinking about Gretchen Ridgmands for Tendencies big time, because this person sounds like maybe she's an upholder and she's acknowledging that she realizes that some of her trainees are not upholders, and she probably does need to think about, well, maybe some of them really are going to respond more to out your accountability, not let's meet to review your goals, but like we're setting goals together, and I would like you to deliver x y z product to me, even if it's a report on how you're doing on set goals like x y z outcome by X date, some people are going to respond much more to that very concrete expectation like turn this more nebulous. Hey, you write a paper into like step one, step two, step three, step forward. So that's one idea that I have and another one is again a little bit gretched and Ruben inspired. But think about the questioner and make sure you're delving into the why in terms of like what are these postdocs or PhD students' goals? What is their end goal to, how many papers do they want to get done, what kind of job do they want to do at the end, what do they want their career to look like? Are they trying to go into industry? And if so, if you can get to kind of like what it's their end result, you can probably give them a pretty clear wealth. Then you need to publish x amount of papers so you can graduate an x time and impress this person and maybe if they have a more concrete understanding of what the path needs to look like, they are going to be more motivated to take the small steps along the way they need to get that path done. So I don't know, I am no expert in this. I can only think back to like my own experiences, but it really does sound like you are doing awesome and maybe just thinking a little bit more about how non upholder types or maybe people who are not just as naturally scientist types would want to set goals in these scenarios. Yeah, I think the transition from you know, like people go into science, you know, post doc research whatever. Like I mean, maybe it's different with the postoc because those people already got their PhD, but like, especially the people who are moving towards that, it's like, you go into this because you were always good at science and you're really smart. But coming up with stuff that is completely new as opposed to like following a set you know, path towards something that somebody has kind of laid out and you're now taking the next steps. It's hard. I mean I see this all the time with people who've done very well in school and then they come out it's like well, now what do I do? I mean, I want to make a career in doing X. But if there's no straightforward path, then they get very lost for a while because it's like, Okay, well what job do I get where I can do this? And it's like, well, maybe there isn't a job, Like maybe you have to make your own thing, right, Like, I don't know. I come at this from like there's nobody hiring somebody be a time management expert as a full time job somewhere, Like I, you know, have to come up with my own stuff. And if I want to write books, like there's not a place you get hired where you then write a book. I mean, it's like you have to figure it out and pitch places and whatever. It's it's just far more nebulous and open ended, and it can be a very difficult transition if you are more accustomed to a straightforward path. I'm not saying, you know, you don't have to be a genius to make that leap. It's just a different, you know, mode of thought. And so some of this awkwardness for people may be the difficulty with that transition. But you know, some people really do like more straightforward stuff. I mean they feel more sure with it. And if that is the case, I do wonder if you know you can steer your more self motivated people toward the broad open world if we think there's stuff there and you're going to go find it, and you're less self motivated people toward the more workhorse research of your lab, like you are ninety five percent sure there's something there that you just have to, you know, redo what somebody else did with a different twist on it, and now you know you're going to come up with results from that, and odds are like, it's not going to be a breakthrough paper, but it could be published because it's a new reasonable result, and so you might be able to steer them toward that sort of work at least until they get their sea legs and see the exact process of having done this new research, produced a paper and go from there. So that's just an idea you might do. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. I've been talking with Tessa West about her book Jerks at Work. We've also been talking about creative process and then obviously in the question about you know, how people can learn to set goals or figure out ways that goal setting works for them, and we will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.