Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:22: Happy High Status explained

00:05:04: Becoming a stand-up comedian

00:11:08: Describing yourself using adjectives other than "confident"

00:16:03: Dealing with obstacles to Happy High Status

00:27:40: Dip a toe in the "what if" water

00:33:53: Well-known examples of Happy High Status

00:41:20: Viv's career advice

00:43:21: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers Podcast.  In this episode, you'll hear me in conversation with Viv Groskop, exploring the idea of something called Happy High Status, a new and I think very useful take on how we can build our self-belief.  I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation together.  Viv is smart, insightful, and what I particularly appreciate is how realistic and relevant her ideas and perspective is on how everyone can increase their confidence, or to use her phrase, achieve Happy High Status.  I hope you find this a useful episode. So Viv, welcome back to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  It's been a while since we last talked about it, but you also have one of the very rare privileges, if that's the right word, of being a repeat guest on the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Viv Groskop: It is a great privilege and I feel like I'm a very squiggly person, so I'm always happy to squiggle again.

Sarah Ellis: You are, you are.  And you've got a new book out, called Happy High Status.  And I first came across this concept where you sort of touched on it, you'd certainly introduced it to me, when I read How to Own the Room, but I feel like you've taken it much, much further having dived into it.  So, I think we do need to start at the beginning because lots of people won't be familiar with the concept.  What is Happy High Status; and also, why might it be more useful for us than just confidence, when we're thinking about our careers?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, Happy High Status was an idea I touched on in passing in my previous book, How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking.  And, I guess I would have loved to have written more about it then, but I didn't feel like I quite had the language to explain it to people.  And I wanted to do a project where I was really speaking to women about the difficulties that certain groups of people have speaking in front of others, all the things that hold us back, and I was so focused on that.  And the feedback that I got throughout that project was, "Tell us more about Happy High Status".  And so I thought, "Oh, okay, I have license to do this".  And it also opens up the conversation, because I do think we should pay special attention to certain groups of society who don't naturally have entitlement. Women have only been in the workplace for, let's be generous and say 100 years, and there's still loads of issues around diversity and inclusion that mean that certain people find it more difficult to get heard than others.  So I think that's really important. 

And Happy High Status allows me to show this is something for everyone, absolutely everyone.  The reason I call it Happy High Status, and I'll explain in a moment a bit more about what exactly that is, and not confidence, is because it's a new thing, and it's something no one's ever heard of, and it's something you have to think about and think, "Okay, what is Happy High Status?  What am I like when I have that?"  It doesn't have the baggage that we all have from childhood of confidence. So many of us have had negative messages about confidence from childhood, whether it is, "Oh, you're too confident, why don't you pipe down?  Oh, look at her, she's full of herself, she's too confident"; or the opposite, "Oh, you just need a little bit more confidence, and then everything will be fine".  But nobody actually ever defines what that confidence is.  There never seems to be the right amount of it, everyone either has too much or too little, and nobody explains how do you actually get it; what does it look like?  And no one admits that it's completely subjective.

The idea of Happy High Status comes not from me, it comes from improv comedy and theatre through the 1960s and 1970s.  It was pioneered by this amazing director, called Keith Johnstone, who wrote a book called Status, and it really is about accessing a neutral, magnanimous, generous part of yourself.  In cheesy self-help terms, you could call it your best self if you want.  I think of it as being your least self-conscious self, because that's one of the biggest problems in owning the room and showing up and doing things in front of other people; we feel self-conscious.  And when we feel self-conscious, we feel the opposite of confident.  So, Happy High Status is you when you are not self-conscious. So, the first step is thinking of a time when you're not self-conscious, and for most people, this is either going to be with friends, with family, it could be with colleagues who you really trust and you really like, in a space where you don't second-guess yourself, where you're not thinking, "What's everyone thinking of me?  Oh, no, what if I say this?" 

Well, you're definitely not thinking that.  That's the beginning of your Happy High Status, and it's going to look different on everyone.  So, in some people, it's going to be quite quiet and calm, maybe a little bit reclusive; in other people, it's going to be really noisy and ebullient.  So, Happy High Status is a way of really broadening and personalising this definition of confidence.

Sarah Ellis: And so there, you described Happy High Status as some brilliance that you've borrowed from improv, and you made an incredibly squiggly move in your career.  So, you've always been a writer, you've worked in journalism, but you became or you sort of added to your squiggliness, stand-up comedian.  Now, that is not something that everybody expects to add to their squiggle, I don't think during their career, and you mentioned this idea of not feeling self-conscious.  I can't think of an example of a profession where you feel more self-conscious than being a stand-up comedian, where you're in front of loads of people who are essentially there to judge you and to go, "Do I find this person funny?" and you thinking, "I don't know, are they going to find me funny?"

So, talk to us a little bit about that for you personally, because I think people will find that really fascinating, because did you find that you hadn't got Happy High Status and then you've sort of learned how to access it and then the benefits of it; did you have a bit of it; how has that worked for you personally?

Viv Groskop: Yeah, the concept of Happy High Status is something I found out about when I was probably six months in to starting stand-up.  So, this would be more than ten years ago, around 2011, which is when I did my 100 gigs in 100 consecutive nights, which led to the first book I wrote that's called I Laughed, I Cried: How One Woman Took on Stand-Up and (Almost) Ruined Her Life, and that was a really good example of a kind of squiggly pivot, if you like, that I realised I wanted to do stand-up, wanted to see if I could make it work.  I could continue with my freelance journalism, so I still had my main job going.  I'm really lucky that I've been freelance for almost 25 years now, so I'm used to managing that ebb and flow of work, and I'm used to the hit rate of rejection that you've got to take in that line of work.  So, I had that flexibility in my life to take on a side project and see if it could go somewhere.

So, I started to do stand-up thinking, "This could fit in somewhere, or maybe it won't, or maybe I can't do it, or maybe I can do it, but I can't make any money at it", and I wanted to fast-track the process.  I think when you do have these kinds of career squiggles, you need to try and do things that are going to challenge you.  The coach Tara Mohr, who's the author of Playing Big, she would call this a leap.  So, you choose something that represents a big leap for you that can be done very quickly in a very short amount of time that will teach you something.  So it could be anything from, instead of planning a website for six months and going through 67 different graphic designers looking for the perfect one, you decide that your leap is the website goes up tomorrow; or your leap is, instead of thinking about one day you might have a newsletter, well, you're going to send out a newsletter every day this week. 

And leaps are so useful, just making yourself do things and have an accountability buddy to make you do it. For me, I'm really good at doing things in secret.  I don't like telling other people that I'm doing things.  Other people need to tell somebody else they're doing it so they can say, "You know you said you were going to do that thing, did you do it?"  So with stand-up, I resolved to do this 100 gigs in 100 consecutive nights, and that was in 2011.  And around that time, I heard about this concept, Happy High Status, and started digging into what it looks like.  And it's exactly as you described, that you really need it in this process of stand-up, where you are so self-conscious when you first start doing that because you have no skills, you have no experience, you don't know how to cope if something goes wrong, you don't know why one day it goes really badly and the next day it goes really well, you're just so clueless!  And it's very easy to become self-obsessed.  And once you're self-obsessed, you become more self-conscious, and any audience is going to read that off you in a second. So, you need to really learn how to focus away from yourself.  Happy high status is, like I said, it's when you're with your friends and you're not self-conscious.  When you're in that zone, you are focused on the other people.  You're thinking, "Are they understanding what I'm saying; are they having a good time; is that person listening; how's that person doing?" 

You're not thinking about yourself and what everyone's thinking about you.  So, if you can get into that zone and bring it on stage with you...  So of course in stand-up, it's very counterintuitive because it's just you talking.  But if you can start to think, "Yeah, I know this is just me talking, but actually this is a dialogue because we're making eye contact with each other, I can see if you're understanding or not, I can listen if you laughed or not, and I can dig into the bits where you laugh hard, or back off if you didn't laugh, speed up, slow down".  You learn to treat things as a dialogue and make other people, not even an equal partner in the conversation, they're the most important partner. Then you access this very real, grounded kind of confidence where everything isn't all about you. 

We spend so much time making everything about ourselves, and it's totally understandable.  We all have to do scary things, and in the modern world, we face judgment on all sides.  It doesn't really matter whether you're a stand-up comedian and you're a celebrity and you've got a million followers or you've just got ten people who subscribe to your newsletter, one of them is going to write back and say, "I didn't like the font that you used on this headline".  There's criticism everywhere, and this just really treats it as all part of the process.  And so you concentrate on, how do I make this less about me, how do I be less self-conscious, how do I make this useful, how do I make this palatable for other people, how do I make them come with me, so that it's not just about you getting up there, surviving and getting off again, it's really about creating a moment of connection.  And that's where this lack of self-consciousness really kicks in. It actually is the most wonderful feeling in the world when you're in that zone and you're connecting with other people because you feel part of something.  And that's all any of us are really here for.

Sarah Ellis: And one of the things I found really useful as I was reading through Happy High Status is you have prompts at the end of a chapter.  Sometimes they're exercises, or sometimes they are questions, and one of the things that stood out to me was, "Know why you care about being more confident", and also maybe finding adjectives that are less stressful than the word confident; because as you were describing that then in terms of going, "Well, this is not about me and this is more about maybe how am I making other people feel, and how can I be useful for other people", I found both of those really helpful. I think they stop you from falling into the trap of this sort of sweeping statement of, "Well, I'm just not a confident person", limiting ourselves before we even get started, to actually saying, "Well, when, when do you want to be more confident?  Is it with a particular person; is it in a particular meeting; is it when you stand on stage? which it's not always that, but for some people it often is presenting.  And then rather than just going, "Oh I want to be more confident", actually articulating, "Well, what are the words I want people to use to describe me?" So I was thinking, "Okay, what would that be for me when I'm running, say, workshops for people?"  And I was like, "Of course I do want to be confident, but really what I want to come across as is optimistic, empathetic and knowledgeable".  And for me, I found that much more helpful as a starting point as then thinking, "Well, if that's what I'm trying to achieve, what does that mean then in terms of what I might do and how I show up?"  What did you aim for when you were doing lots of stand-up comedy in a very short space of time and you were making this transition away from just, "Crikey, I just need to be confident and maybe try not to worry about people, whether they laugh or not"; what were those words that sprung to mind for you?

Viv Groskop: I would often have a word very similar to the words that you're describing.  That's just such a perfect interpretation of what I'm trying to get across.  Thank you.  You know, you can be optimistic and knowledgeable quite easily, and you can channel those things quite easily, and they're very specific.  And you can think immediately, "What are the things that I can say that will be optimistic?  What is the vibe that I can channel that will make me look optimistic?  How can I make that clear in my language and my interactions with people?"  Whereas if you say, "I just want to be confident"; what? 

So with me in stand-up, I used to think, "Warm, be warm, you're going to be warm here".  Or sometimes I'd think, "Wow, I want people to think, wow". I was always trying out, you know, you're doing 5 minutes, 10 minutes, then you're working up to 20 minutes, then you do an Edinburgh show, which is an hour, and I did six years of Edinburgh shows.  So, often ahead of a show, I would have maybe a different objective for different parts of the show.  So, a part of the show would be warm, another part would be charisma, another part would be dynamism, another part would be slow down, another part would be go deep, don't be afraid to go deep.  So, anything that means something to you and is very specific and is something that you can actually do… I find for some people something like clarity is actually really useful.  That's quite useful in a lot of jobs, is don't try to bring confidence, try to bring clarity or try to bring concision, those are really useful things, or try to be succinct.  Because those things are very precise, they're very achievable.  You will know at the end, this is a really crucial thing actually, you will know at the end if you did that thing or not.  With stand-up, I always had to think, "Well, was I actually warm?  Did I put it across as wow?"  Not every audience is going to like it and not everyone's going to think,

"Wow", but I did it and I tried my best, I ticked it off.  I'm always trying to find things where I can tick it off and think, "Well, I did the thing", because once you've put it out there, you're not in control of the outcome, no matter how confident you are or how wow or amazing you are, there'll always be somebody who didn't like it or always be somebody who's got some kind of feedback for you, and that's okay.  You can take that or not take that.  We could have a whole other podcast about how to define whether feedback is worth taking or not; that's a whole life skill! But if you know for yourself that you did the thing, whether it's optimism, show your knowledge, be concise, be succinct.  For me, it would sometimes be, do three new jokes.  Did I do three new jokes?  Yeah, tick, well done, good. 

And sometimes it would be things like, don't beat yourself up, or be free, or get it wrong tonight, or be different to the last person.  I just would set myself achievable goals.  And if I just kept that in mind while I was talking, it helped me stay focused on the goal rather than being focused on my self-consciousness.

Sarah Ellis: And so, what do we do in the inevitable situation where someone else is getting in the way of our Happy High Status?  So I think, "Okay, well I know what that looks like for me. 

I want to be, let's say, optimistic and empathetic".  And then you're at work and you're in a meeting with someone who seems determined to be pessimistic and to maybe take the opposite approach, and you really feel like they are making you feel self-conscious because they are judging you, and you can see that someone isn't responding very well.  And so, they might be being deliberately difficult or it might just be that they are different or you've caught someone on a bad day, all of those things. 

And I think in my observation, the challenge is that we always make those things about us again. So, back to your point about, "It's not about me", you know, you have a conversation with your boss and it doesn't go well, you sort of go, "I don't think they think I'm smart enough".  We go back to some of those, we call them gremlins, confidence gremlins, beliefs that get in our way.  So, I can imagine here thinking, "I've got the best intentions to have Happy High Status", and then how do you stop it sort of seeping away the minute something threatens it?

Viv Groskop: Yeah, the moment you're describing is really when your ego is coming under attack, and ego is really important because ego protects us from a lot of things in life, it allows us to shine in certain environments, it allows us to have pride and dignity, but sometimes our ego takes a bit of a hit.  And in stand-up, this would be the moment maybe where somebody heckles you, or where you have a prolonged tumbleweed silence, which is actually worse than a heckle. 

And so those things are wounding.  Many, many things in life are a little heckle to our ego.  And Happy High Status is about staying strong and grounded in your ego and recognising that you're good enough, you've got this, not every day can be perfect, not every argument can be won, not every colleague is going to be your best friend, not every boss is going to be on your side; but more or less you've got this, you're learning the lessons, you're doing your best, and your ego cannot really be attacked if you stay in Happy High Status. So sometimes for me, if I'm feeling my buttons are being pushed, which they regularly are because I'm a human being, and we all endure so many slights and humiliations.  You know, I've interviewed nearly 200 people on my podcast, How to Own the Room, and that is a conversation with incredible people like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Atwood, Professor Mary Beard, and they've all had regular attacks to their ego from all kinds of different sources. 

So, picking out the moments when those pricks come -- oh, that's a really colourful thing I've just said -- but you know what I mean, pricks to the ego and other kinds of pricks, and picking out those moments when you're being wounded and thinking, "Oh, this is when I need to dig into my Happy High Status, this is when --", just think, you don't say this to other people because they think that you were mad, but just think to yourself, "Oh, yeah, this is it, I'm being triggered a little bit here.  How can I just breathe and listen and see what's really going on, and step back a little bit, and not allow myself to have my buttons pushed?  How can I take a moment to step back and not react?" Sometimes it's about saying to that other person, "Tell me more about why you feel this way", or repeating what they said and say, "When you say this thing, I'm hearing this; is that right?" and actually giving them more room in the conversation so that they really get out whatever the aggressive thing is or the difficult thing or the hostile, really get it out.  You know, sometimes in comedy with a heckler, you engage with them.  Sometimes, not always, you engage and you have a chat and it might actually lead to something that is then useful for you to use in the room. But another really important rule that is connected to that is, pick your battles.  So, not every battle you can win, you just can't.  And in comedy, for example, there are some heckles that you want to respond to and use and incorporate and might make it more fun for everyone; but there are some heckles that are going to spoil everything for everyone and that represent a battle you can't win, and in comedy there's a protocol for that and that person may well be removed from the room.  So, if you insert that idea into a work context, you could think, "You know what, if we were in a comedy club right now, the bouncers would be walking you out of it".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, nice!

Viv Groskop: But you can't do that, that's not going to happen, so I'm just going to have to stand my ground and repeat the mantra in my head of, "Pick your battles, pick your battles, pick your battles".  Because sometimes, if this is about a very sensitive issue, like I don't know, a sexist comment or a racist comment or a homophobic comment, you have to be really cautious about how you respond to that.  You might want to think, "Okay, in this moment I can't pick this battle because it's going to be the equivalent of going nuclear.  But I'm going to walk out of this meeting and I'm going to make a little note of what was said and at what time.  And then if there's a pattern of those things, then I can take those to somebody".  That's a good Happy High Status response that doesn't make you too vulnerable. So, learning when to respond, whether it's you having your buttons pushed, or whether it's you being tempted to wade into a battle that you can't win, you know, we can't win the battle against 4,000 years of patriarchy.  Don't go into a meeting trying to win that battle, just go into the meeting being yourself and trying to keep your ego in check.

Sarah Ellis: Someone once said to me, when I think I was finding this hard -- I think a lot of the time I would describe myself as having a Happy High Status, but there would be certain people where I would completely capitulate.  And for me, that never looked like winning, that looked like the introvert in me really withdrawing.  And then you come out of those meetings and those conversations, and you're really frustrated because you know you've not done yourself justice; you've not shared your opinions, you've not had the gravitas that you have the rest of the time, and then somebody -- and I get very distracted by the other person, essentially.  And being frank, I blame other people, other than myself, I'd be like, "It's their fault and it's their behaviour".

Then someone said to me, "Well, just think about how much time and space that person is occupying in your brain", so like how much are they dominating your thoughts, say, that evening?  And I might be like, "Oh, it's all I could think about", because I'm a real thinker.  And then they said, "And how much time and space do you think you occupy in their thoughts?" And I was like, "Zero, like 0%".  And that was really transformational for me to just kind of go, "Well actually, I need to also take a bit of accountability if I want the Happy High Status".  And so it's a choice, knowing that you have got a choice to not have to feel like you have to win or not feel like you have to withdraw or, yeah, it's a prick to your ego, but that's okay.  Knowing that I've got a choice, I can recover from that quickly. We all like choice and control, right, it helps us I think day to day, and I think what you're describing as well is going, "You have got choices".  When something threatens your Happy High Status, you have a choice as a comedian: do you respond, do you not respond; how do you respond?  Knowing we've got those choices I think is really empowering.

Viv Groskop: Yeah, exactly.  It's also about really judging the level of self-criticism that you're bringing to that interaction.  Because as you say, they're not thinking about you, it's not a big deal.  You're the one who is blowing it up into this massive thing.  And it's incredibly difficult to think to yourself, "Well, just don't do that".  You bring awareness to that situation and think, "Well, is it actually benefiting me to overanalyse this?  Or, is this person actually quite difficult with everybody? 

And, am I not that experienced talking to them about this thing that we're involved in together?"  Maybe there is a bit of a power imbalance, and it would be very tricky for you to get the better of them. I am finding, opening up this conversation about this new book, Happy High Status, with people, this is a question people are coming to me with the most is, "What do you do if you work with someone who's impossible?"  And when I dig into that, they're very often talking about somebody who is a narcissist of some kind.  These terms are kind of overused now, but everybody knows what kind of person we're talking about there; somebody who sucks all of the life out of the room, or somebody who only wants to have their own voice heard.  I don't have a good answer in those situations.  I would not want to be a colleague of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.  I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody's political sensibilities, I'm just drawing a broad brush here because I think we all know what's going on! 

I wouldn't want to be a colleague of those people; that would be a waste of my time, it would be a waste of my energy to work out how do I interact with that person, how do I be heard by them.  That for me personally is a losing battle. For other people, they might think, "No, actually, I want to take this on, I want to find a way".  But you have to recognise that you've chosen a path that not very many people would choose and that is potentially unwinnable, actually.  I would give the advice in that situation, if you really are working with somebody completely impossible, but you want to stay in the situation and not go off and have another Squiggly Career, which is what I would advise, what you really need is more self-care, so that when you are in the situation with that person, you are fully rested, you are properly exercised, you're fully hydrated, you sleep really well, so that you're always bringing your most positive and physically relaxed version of yourself into those interactions.  And then you might have a bit of a chance at landing some blows in that very difficult battle. But increasingly, those jobs are filled with people who are incredibly stressed.  I work with some people and we'll talk about these kinds of issues and they'll say, "I haven't had a good night's sleep in four years", or they're going through a relationship breakup or they're having a difficulty with one of their children.  And in that situation, you're not going to be able to go into a situation with a difficult person and somehow win against them, it's a ridiculous challenge to set yourself.

Sarah Ellis: I definitely learned that the hard way.  It's really interesting listening to you reflect in that way, because if I think about when I have been able to kind of retain the Happy High Status, it was because, you know, maybe I wasn't dealing with that person every day, so it was more occasional, so I could sort of cope with that, and generally the rest of my life was going well.  Whereas, if I think about the time where I walked away, to your point in terms of sometimes maybe the right thing to do is squiggle, I remember thinking, "Did I fail at that?  Was that my issue?" But actually to your description, I think I walked away because also I was in a part of my life where I'd just had a baby, I was coming back from maternity leave, I'd got a really long commute, and I was in that exact situation.  I was like, "I can't win here, so do you know what, I am going to walk away".  If anything, I left it too long to make that decision, in case that's useful for any of our listeners. One of the other ideas I really liked in the book, that I did a little bit of extra underlining of, was this concept that you describe as, "Dip a toe in the 'what if' water", and I was like, Oh, I really like that, I think that's really memorable".  I always like a memorable, sticky phrase that I can imagine repeating and sharing with lots of people.  So, could you describe a bit more for our listeners, what is this water; why is it important; and what does that practically look like, the "what if" water?

Viv Groskop: This is really an idea that is about experimentation.  And again, it's really learned mostly from stand-up comedy for me, although I've applied it to so many other things, including journalism, writing non-fiction, you know, I've written six books now.  I also started writing radio plays and other squiggles --

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I saw that.

Viv Groskop: -- a few years ago, I've done seven radio plays now, I've written six Edinburgh shows.  And it's really about giving yourself permission to ask, "Well, what if I can do this?  What if I can find a way of doing this that is like something that I already know how to do?"  Or, "What if I just need to speak to somebody who's already done this before?"  What if just allows you to think very openly. When I first started doing stand-up, I thought to myself, "Well, what if I did this every night for 100 nights; what if?" because then I'll know in three months whether I'm any good or not, it won't take me a year.  And it was such a freeing thing.  And we don't ask ourselves, "What if?" enough.  So, you know, what if you don't need your whole salary this month and you keep 10% of it back for this other project you want to work on?  What if you actually have a friend who will build you a website for free?  What if you actually don't need a website, you can just start asking people, "Can I do this piece of work for you?"  It's just a very, very basic and freeing idea to have this what-if energy of openness and asking, because it's so obvious for what's going on around us, you know, the pace of change, the pace of our careers now, which is insane. People used to say we're going to have five careers in a lifetime.  That now is a conservative estimate, we're all going to have many different careers in our lifetimes.  So, what if everything you know is wrong?  What if everything you know is completely just an assumption? 

I totally discovered this in comedy.  What if a heckle is not an insult, it's a gift?  What if a bad gig is actually your route to doing the best gig that you've ever done?  What if a two-star review actually connects you with somebody who then becomes a massive fan of your work?  There are so many things. I always love that -- well, this is appropriate, actually, I've just remembered this, the Rudyard Kipling poem, If, which talks about success and failure being imposters who have the same face.  So, many times we think something is a failure and three years down the line, like you're saying, you know, it seemed like a failure walking away from this job.  Best thing you ever did, you wish you did it earlier.  Same with me, I took a redundancy when I was 27. 

My parents were horrified.  Best thing I ever did, never worked again, always worked for myself after that. Other things that feel like a success, you know, "Oh my God, I got five-star review for the show, I got this review in this amazing place, this famous person came to see me", etc.  Three years down the line, I can see actually, "No, that show pretty much tanked and I was kind of being a bit lazy in that show".  So, often things that seem like a success later turn out not to be, and things that seem like a failure turn out to be the best thing ever.  And that's a slightly depressing thing to learn sometimes, is that nothing is really fixed in terms of whether it's really great or whether it's really terrible.  But for me, that is the what-if energy of, "Well, what if this is all going to be okay?"  Or, what if this amazing thing is just the start, or it's a pivot, or it's not going to turn out to be so amazing, but then you can course-correct. There's a massive, massive freedom there of not always trying to get everything perfect, get everything right.  For me, anything that opens up your mind to, "Well, how can I experiment?  How can I just give this a go with a minimum cost to myself?"  You don't want to be doing things that are -- I was really careful early on in comedy, and I didn't want to do things that really put me off.  I tried not to do gigs that would be super-terrifying and scary, or way out of my comfort zone.  Take baby steps in these experiments but take those leaps, you know, things that you can do really fast, gain the information, gain data and then do something else.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I think the word I wrote down there when you said, "Oh yeah, it could be seen as being fixed", I was like, "Or freeing".  And then you used that word freedom, because I think in what you just described, "what if" actually works in multiple ways because firstly it pulls opportunity towards us, it sort of encourages us to take small nudges towards things that actually we're really interested in; but also, it helps us to reframe. Some of those examples you were just sharing then are actually really good reframes in those moments where we often really need them because maybe, let's say, four gigs in, you'd had a really bad gig and you'd not gone,

"Okay, what if that bad gig is going to help me be even better tomorrow night, and maybe actually tomorrow night is going to be the best night", you could stop.  And you might have stopped something you went on to then really enjoy, and then you've got so much more learning to come. So, I think this idea of always being a work in progress and doing that through lots of experimenting, I think is that sort of learning mindset that everybody needs in their Squiggly Careers.  And I spot when people start to do this, we talk about having a create-not-wait attitude when it comes to your career.  What you've just described is a really good, practical realisation of some of that mindset that we want to help people with. One of the things you always do in your book, so I feel like you always do, and partly because I always think probably about your podcast as well, you do share examples of both really famous and really interesting -- maybe sometimes they're connected, sometimes they're different -- people who are really good examples of what you're describing, so well-known people.  Or sometimes I actually hadn't heard of them, and then you have me googling, you have me in all sorts of rabbit holes.  

I was like, "Oh, who's this person?" I'd not heard of them, so I felt not very well read.  But there are some people that I think we would all know that you mentioned, so I just wondered if you could give us just a couple of examples of people you would point to where you sort of say, "They're pretty Happy High Status", and we see that and spot that and could recognise that.

Viv Groskop: Yeah, what I'm always trying to do is point out that Happy High Status looks different on every single person.  So this is not about, "Oh, let's look at George Clooney".  Like, I tell an example of --

Sarah Ellis: You do talk about George Clooney a bit, which I do enjoy! Viv Groskop: He's a very obvious, stereotypical, charismatic, Happy High Status person, and I don't want people to fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh no, I have to make myself into the Hollywood star version of myself.  It's completely intimidating and impossible for most of us.  So, he's a really great stereotype of a particular kind of Happy High Status. But for me, a really useful one that I think makes it click for a lot of people is Greta Thunberg.  And, you know, there's no two people more different than George Clooney and Greta Thunberg. 

She's, for me, an example of somebody who has this quiet, controlled, almost reclusive Happy High Status, where she's got this very gentle energy, she speaks very slowly, remember she's speaking her second language; she has Asperger's syndrome, she's self-confessed depressive, you know, she was depressed and off school for four years before she started out as an activist and a brilliant public speaker. What I love about her example is that she shows you don't have to pretend to be something you're not to be heard and to connect with people.  You can be authentic, you don't have to be perfect, you know, she's not perfect.  She often hesitates in her speaking, she often speaks almost uncomfortably slowly, but there's something very genuine and very real about her to me.  I think she's very comfortable in herself, even in the moments when she's owning the fact that she is broadly uncomfortable.  She's completely open about that, and she's made her own peace with it.  And I think people really understand what that is, and it's definitely something that is very new.  You wouldn't have seen that kind of confidence, if we can even call that confidence, 50 years ago, 30 years ago; it's very new. So, what I'm encouraging people is to say that whatever your Happy High Status looks like, sounds like, feels like, it might be something that we haven't seen yet. 

You think of Greta Thunberg, you think of even Zelenskyy, he has a completely different kind of Happy High Status, probably closer to George Clooney than Greta Thunberg.  But his leadership style, which is incredibly informal, reassuring, empathetic, a kind of very soft, soft gravitas, you wouldn't have seen that in a leader 20 or 30 years ago.  That's something brand new for people to think about.  Jacinda Ardern, incredible empathy in the way that she speaks, openness, generosity.  Sanna Marin, the former Prime Minister of Finland, also a really interesting one to look at. Then right on the other end of the spectrum, I love looking at the footage of Chris Rock when he was slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars.  On live television, he had to think to himself, and you can see him thinking it, where is my Happy High Status?  Because he had to continue speaking live on television to go back to camera and say, "Well, here we are at the Oscars", etc, and you can see him, just his eyes are dashing off to the side to ask like, "Do you really want me to continue?  Are we not going to a break?"  And that happens in a split second and then he gives it, "Oh no, we're not going to a break, I need to be Happy High Status, I need to keep this going".  So, very interesting to see how that works in his kind of dynamic Happy High Status. So, trying to show people there are so many different ways of doing this and reminding people as well that I give these examples not to say to people, "You need to become a famous person; you need to become a politician; you need to host the Oscars".  I say those examples because we can picture them, that's why they're useful.  But they're useful whether you're doing a job interview, whether you're doing a difficult phone call, they're all ways of thinking, "Well, actually, what does that leadership look like and leadership of the self look like; and what if I can make it up; what if nobody's seen it yet; what if it doesn't look like something that we've seen before?" because all of those examples are things that we've never seen before.  And when we saw them, we're like, "Oh, yeah, that works".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think that's what I found reassuring.  Actually, when I read How to Own the Room as well, as Happy High Status, I think in both of those, you are very clear.  There's lots of practical exercises and ideas, and then interspersed with some research that you mentioned along the way, and then examples; you're not saying, "Here is a playbook", because I'm always very suspicious of the ten-list, silver-bullet books, where you go, "Well, do these ten things, and then that will equal this thing".  And it's the implication of like, we all need to follow the same formula, which just feels too simplistic in a complicated world.  And so, actually it feels more accessible for us all to think, "Well, what does this individually mean for me; what's my contribution; what does Happy High Status look like for me?" 

And it's always a benefit of hindsight, isn't it? I certainly spent the first part of my career pretending to be something I wasn't because I thought that was what was needed.  Now, it wasn't really anyone ever saying that to me, but that was more, you know, I was in environments with lots of extroverts, I felt that whoever spoke the most got seen the most and progressed the most.  So I went, "Okay, well, I might be an introvert, but that's basically not an option if I'm ambitious in my career.  And I am ambitious in my career", but then it's really, really hard work.  So, I don't think I accessed Happy High Status very frequently, because you're spending so much time and energy pretending, essentially, and doing something that's really far away from really who you are. But then funnily enough, once I started to sort of be a bit more accepting of myself, and I think some of that did also come with my own self-belief, I then obviously progressed much quicker.  And you know, with the benefit of perspective, no surprise that then once I started to just be myself and to figure out, "Okay, well I don't need to be the same as my extrovert boss, I don't need to have confidence in the same way that they have it.  I can sort of do it in my way", well actually, I was so much better, I was just so much better at my job.  And obviously, you just enjoy it so much more as well.

Viv Groskop: Yeah, absolutely.  And that is, again, the what-if mentality is, "What if I can trust myself; what if I'm already okay the way that I am; what if I am enough; what if I actually know how to do this and all I need to do is just have a go?"

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  And so we always finish our interviews -- and we will have finished our interview, our first one together, with the same question, Viv.  So I'm going to go back, find what you said the first time, and then compare it to this time, just to warn you -- by asking all of our guests, all of our Ask the Expert guests, what's the one bit of career advice that you would pass on to our listeners?  So, sometimes it could be words of wisdom that have worked really well for you, could just be some things that feel very relevant for where you are in your life right now, or maybe something that someone has told you that's just really stuck.  But what do you want to leave our listeners with today?

Viv Groskop: I wonder if I'm repeating myself because I haven't listened to that episode in a while, but I'll take the risk of repeating myself because --

Sarah Ellis: That just means you're consistent.  That's a good thing, right?

Viv Groskop: My dad has a piece of advice that I always followed from childhood and I used to write it at the top of my exam papers.  It would be so funny if I said this last time as well.  It's KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid.  I looked it up a while ago and it was actually some subject of like a self-help book in the 1960s or something, or it was something from the US Navy or something.  It's a principle of when you're struggling with an idea, you're making something complicated, you're second-guessing yourself, just write down, "KISS", Keep It Simple Stupid.  I mean, it's a little bit mean, I probably wouldn't let my children use it or call them stupid, but I take it from my dad!  And it always made me think, "Okay, how can I do this the easy way; what's the simple version of this; what's the 'stupid person's' version of this?" and it just makes you laugh at yourself, makes you calm down, and makes you think, "Maybe I don't need to make this so difficult.  What if this is actually easy?  What does that look like?"

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think in a world where it's very easy to get overwhelmed, Keep It Simple Stupid is pretty much always good advice most days.  So Viv, thank you so much for joining us again on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I really enjoyed reading Happy High Status.  I always refer back to How to Own the Room.  I'm always recommending it to other people, the book and the podcast.  Also I love following you on Instagram, and that is a small group of people that I choose to follow, because I think you're always funny and fascinating and I think you're fearless in following your own advice, so I always really appreciate that, so thank you so much.

Viv Groskop: Oh, thank you so much.  I always love to have a bit of squiggle in my life.

Sarah Ellis: Thanks for listening to my conversation with Viv today, I hope you found it helpful.  As a reminder if you've got any questions, people you'd like to hear from, ideas for future episodes, you can always get in touch with us.  We're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  And you can find loads of extra free resources for the podcast online.  Just go to amazingif.com, click on the podcast, and you'll find PodNotes and PodSheets.  But that's everything for this week.  Thank you so much for listening, and bye for now.