Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction 00:00:18: Distinguishing fortitude from resilience 00:02:27: Relationship between adversity and fortitude 00:06:08: ACE scores 00:10:53: Marrying up growth mindset with personal grit 00:15:25: Three foundations of fortitude… 00:15:55: … control 00:21:24: … identity 00:29:38: … community 00:37:53: The importance of "simcha" 00:40:42: Bruce's career advice 00:44:25: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hello, Bruce, and welcome back to the Squiggly Careers podcast. Bruce Daisley: I feel really bad, because you said that no one comes back, "You're not allowed to come back"! Helen Tupper: Bruce is back!  Bruce is our book best friend, and we are very excited to talk about book number two, Fortitude, today. Bruce Daisley: Thank you very much. Helen Tupper: So, let's talk about the word "fortitude" for a moment, because this is a book all about resilience, what it is, what it isn't, and what you might need to develop instead, and you've chosen deliberately to call it Fortitude.  So, what's the distinction between resilience and fortitude; and why is it an important distinction to make? Bruce Daisley: Well for me, they're broadly synonymous, in the sense that I'm trying to say that resilience is a capacity to reenergise, to bounce back, to deal with unpredictability and uncertainty.  But the resilience word itself has become very tired for a lot of people, I think.  I started writing this book pretty much as COVID started, the first round of COVID started, and I remember chatting to a few people, when you were allowed to go back and meet people in person, and said, "I'm writing a book on resilience", and there was a weariness with a lot of people; they'd go, "Oh God, resilience". In fact, I've got a friend who works at the Whittington Hospital and she said, latterly, but she said, "If you mention resilience to people who work in the NHS, they will thump you!"  So, there was just a recognition that it's sort of become productised, and it's sort of become this word that because of that, it's had every bit of meaning, or every bit of magic that it had has been sucked out of it. So, that was it for me.  It's like, okay, so firstly let's recognise that resilience does exist, or fortitude, or whatever you want to call it, it does exist; and we can see that, because we can see it manifested in like the people in Ukraine.  Who could doubt that these people who were office workers on a Friday, and they're taking arms on a Monday, who could doubt that they've been filled with some inspirational level of bravery, that all of us consider to be almost inconceivable?  We can't imagine that we would somehow do that.  So, they seem to be imbued with something that is admirable and beautiful.  But using the resilience word for it I felt was tired and weary. So that was it, really, a point of recognition that this clearly does exist, but the way we're talking about it has been unfortunately, I think, deliberately misappropriated by people, and so it was about pressing reset on that. Helen Tupper: I something think that you find the books that you need to read, you know, when you've got those insights and it really speaks to you, and the early bit of the book, you talk a lot about the relationship between adversity, particularly adversity earlier on in life, and its relationship with resilience and success in later life.  And I was reading this through and reading about some things called ACE scores, and all kinds of things, and reflecting on my own life and thinking, "Oh gosh, there are definitely moments of adversity in my younger life", and thinking, "Is what I do now, and how much energy and commitment and relentless I do now, how much of that is related to early life adversity?" Could you share some of the insights about the relationship between the adversity you might experience earlier on in life, and its relationship between resilience and fortitude later in life? Bruce Daisley: Yeah.  There are a couple of igniting factors, the reason why I did the book.  Firstly, the resilience word I was hearing all the time when I was in Beirut.  So, I was researching stuff, I was in Beirut, my partner's Lebanese and there was a big explosion in 2020, and all of the news coverage referred to resilience; so, that was one of the things. The second part is, I'd read this work that I couldn't get out of my head, and it was about a study that's very relevant.  We're recording this just in the week that Mo Farah has come out and said, "Actually, I'm not the person you think me to be.  I'm actually, rather than someone who was sent here by my family and have formed a new life here, my dad's died, my mum effectively sold me into modern slavery, and I came here as a domestic servant.  And, from the age of pre-teen years, I was a domestic servant".  So, we might look at Mo Farah's story and go, "Well, at least he's been gifted with this good fortune that's lifted him out of this traumatic start in life", but no, they're not an accidental coincidence. What you discover is that UK Sport did this remarkable piece of work, and this is what I couldn't get out of my head, that studied 16 British super-elite athletes, and they say all of them household names.  All of them, of the ones they studied, all of them had a significant moment of childhood trauma.  To just emphasise that that's not universal, the ones that they compared them to, who were the silver medallists, the bronze medallists, the people who did well but not quite win gold, only one in four of them had a moment of significant trauma. So, there seems to be this remarkable thing where trauma, firstly it seems to be this interesting common factor of people who achieve elite things.  Then you go on and you look, and I found myself studying this, and there was some wonderful work done by a couple of GPs effectively, a guy called Vincent Felitti, and a guy called Robert Ander, both doctors in the US.  Robert Ander was studying former retired combat soldiers, and he was really interested that no matter how ill they were, they seemed to self-medicate.  They seemed to smoke, they seemed to drink, and it was almost like the experiences they had seemed to be somehow directing them into these adaptive behaviours, where they're smoking and drinking, almost to self-medicate out of it. Simultaneously, Vincent Felitti said something which is just astonishing.  He was dealing in a weight loss clinic, and he had patients who were 300 lbs, 400 lbs, you know, people really struggling with obesity, and he found himself accidentally asking a question of one of them, which was related to her sexual history.  And effectively, he discovered firstly that this patient had been abused by her grandfather, but then he started asking other patients.  He found 55% of his patients had experienced sexual abuse as children. The two of these guys didn't know each other, but they encountered each other at a sort of learning lunch effectively, and they realised the adjacency of their work, and they created this list, which is called The Adverse Childhood Experiences list.  So, it's a list of ten things.  Some of them look remarkably gentle, which might be like, "Were you subject to emotional abuse?  Were you subject to physical abuse?  Was there parental divorce?  Was there someone at home who went to jail?  Did you live with addiction?"  There's some other things there, some other things that you might go, "Is parental divorce that big an issue?" but actually, it very strongly correlates with adult obesity. But what you discover is, through each of these ten questions, you give a yes or no answer, or you give a 1 or a 0 zero, and you add up your score at the end of it.  So, it enables you firstly to have a discussion with a doctor, because you can say, "My ACE score is 4", and it enables you to have a discussion.  But what you discover is, once you know this ACE score, once you catalogue someone's experience of adversity, of trauma really, it's got a remarkable correlation with life outcomes. If you've got an ACE score of 6, your life is, on average, 20 years shorter than if you've got an ACE score of 0.  If you've got an ACE score of 4, you've got 33 times higher likelihood of having educational issues.  If you've got an ACE score of 4, your likelihood of getting lung cancer is double, your likelihood of getting heart disease is double.  And so, you look at these things and you go, "Wow, firstly we've got an incredible aggregation of data going on here", Mo Farah and, let's say, Linford Christie, Kelly Holmes, Andy Murray, all of these people who've experienced significant trauma and have gone on to be elite athletes; there seems to be something that propels people who've got an incredible gift into what they can accomplish. But the actual experience of a trauma, an adversity, is an incredibly harmful one.  And through those two things, I think you can see a path to understanding where our response to adversity comes from.  For me, all of that is about identity, because all of that -- if you hear Kelly Holmes, Kelly Holmes will say, "Sport became my identity".  She was adopted, she had parental abandonment, she was very severely bullied at school, I think latterly we clearly learned that she's been wrestling with issues with her own sexual identity and feeling ashamed about that.  And so, you look at all of those things and you go, "Well actually, her then channelling all of her interest into sporting excellence, now you recognise that redemptive power of that power of identity, I think". Helen Tupper: So, can you have resilience without adversity? Bruce Daisley: Yes, I think you can.  There was a psychologist who studied this who said, "There's something of a Goldilocks zone, that if you have no adversity whatsoever, it seems to lead to slightly lower outcomes and slightly less favourable happiness with your life.  But there's a Goldilocks zone, where a certain amount of adversity is helpful. I should also say that, a guy who runs a Center for the Developing Child in the US, a guy called Jack Shonkoff, he says, "Identity isn't predetermined to be the outcome of our lives".  So, these people work with people who've experienced significant moments of childhood trauma.  And actually, the most important step is understanding it.  Once you understand it, then you can start addressing it, so you can give people the understanding that their experience isn't who they are. So actually, the most important part of this work is understanding it, because my ACE score, for example, it's so fascinating; for me, my ACE score is 4.  So I immediately start going, "Gosh, right, okay.  Well firstly, that would have a deleterious effect on my health, and secondly would explain my relentless need to try and succeed and do more". Helen Tupper: I'm a 5, Bruce, so yeah! Bruce Daisley: Oh, right, yeah I can believe it, because I reckon my sister, my sister's read it and she's studied a lot of psychology, and she's gone, "Oh yeah, everything about your behaviour is entirely consistent with your fingerprint of experience". Sarah Ellis: So, it's interesting, as somebody who is a 0, so Helen and I, I think, read Fortitude through a very different lens and had a very different response and reaction to it, and I think partly because of that.  It was like, we connected with different parts of the book, which also shows I think it's useful for everyone in different ways; because one of the things, one of the assumptions I was making as I read the early part of the book is, "Okay, some of these people who've got high ACE scores, crikey, they're going to have a lot of grit.  They will have really grown their grit through no choice of their own, because of their very difficult life circumstances.  Maybe that meant they've got a load of grit and a real growth mindset, and had to learn to be positive, and maybe that's helped them to be successful". However, you really challenge some, what I think could even be described as conventional wisdom now, that lots of people refer to and understand, around growth mindset and positive psychology, and you don't just say you're not sure, you quite proactively challenge some of those concepts.  So, I wonder if you could just talk a bit about that research, so almost your understanding there of resilience and fortitude you've just described to us; and, how does that marry up, or not, with growth mindset and grit in particular, because loads of our listeners will be really familiar with both of those ideas, and we talk about those ideas a lot.  So, I'm really interested to get into that debate a bit, about the relationship between the two. Bruce Daisley: For me, it's a little bit like skin creams, in the sense that -- Sarah Ellis: I wasn't expecting that response, for sure! Bruce Daisley: Okay!  But for me, there's a need for skin creams, in the sense that people see themselves aging before their very eyes in the mirror and so they go, "I need something that resolves this".  But all of the evidence you look for skin creams is that they don't prevent aging. Helen Tupper: Don't say that, Bruce, I spend a lot of money on skin cream! Bruce Daisley: It might make our skin feel better and look better, but there is nothing whatsoever that reverses the impact of aging.  In a very similar way, marketing as an industry has responded to a need, and tried to synthesise a product that answers the need, and you can see it very clearly.  Martin Seligman, who's probably the most eminent psychologist in the world, he's the Robert De Niro of psychology, in the sense that he did some really good work at the start of his career, and he's done some not so good work at the end of his career, and he reports in his own book how he'd written some very lovely, popular psychology books, and the US Army and pretty much education authorities came to him and said, "If we gave you money, will you solve our issue?" In the US Army, the issue was PTSD is off the scale.  You're significantly more likely to die from suicide if you're a combat soldier during the course of your life, than you are to be killed by an enemy combatant.  So, as a result of that, there was a need for it.  The skincare regime, there was a demand for it, and so people created a product.  And the interesting thing, what catalysed that exploration for me, is that so many people I know who've done resilience courses have said to me, "It didn't work, I don't feel any different".  Okay, that's really interesting, because like a skincare product, it's a charming, lovely idea, we build a routine around it, we've created something that seems in service of self-care; but if it doesn't work, there are fair questions to ask about that. So, I think I would say, I'd broadly categorise grit and growth mindset as the resilience orthodoxy.  I think it's probably slightly unfair to growth mindset, because I think there is vaguely some substance to growth mindset, but it's not remotely the substance that is pedalled, offered and promoted.  It's worth saying that people have really struggled with any degree of clinical desire to replicate the effect of growth mindset.  In fact, pretty much the first model of growth mindset has been pedalled; I don't think there've been any replications of it. However, latterly they have adapted it slightly, because one of the comments was, someone said, "The only thing in common with all of the proofs of growth mindset is one single thing: it's that Carol Dweck was associated with them.  And all of the things that have not demonstrated growth mindset have got one thing in common: Carol Dweck wasn't work on them".  And so, whether that's true or not, I think there is latterly -- I chat to a few educationalists who say, "There is some evidence that some --", it's like teaching a style of revision. There are some benefits to it, but I pull back firstly from the belief in it; and secondly, actually if you want to find proof and evidence, there is a parallel body of work that is so emphatically evidenced, which is the power of feeling connected to other people.  And there's so much evidence that's consistently replicated that is proven everywhere, that feeling part of a group and feeling connected to other people is transformational for experience in life. I think that, for me, it comes from the fact that I think the US -- my partner's American, I'm not criticising the US; the US is very fixated on individualistic cures, "What can I prescribe for this person that will solve their problem?"  And the solution broadly, resilience is a collectivist solution, it's about feeling connected to other people.  And sometimes that's an inconvenient answer for people to hear. Helen Tupper: So, foundations of fortitude then, in the book you talk about the importance of control, identity and community as being the three things that I think you would say count the most towards fortitude.  Could we explore each of them in turn, starting with control, which again when I was reading that, I consider one of my primary values to be freedom, and I was like, "Well, is it freedom, Helen; or is it actually a need for control, based on what you talk about in the chapter about it?"  Can you talk to us a little bit more about why control is so important in the context of fortitude? Bruce Daisley: Let's imagine a scenario where someone listening to this is maybe not feeling resilient, and one of the things that probably will inform that is that they open their calendar, either on a Monday morning, and it's back-to-back meetings; or maybe, they open it up on Sunday night, and it's back-to-back meetings.  They know that they're going to have a lot of incoming requests from customers, and they're going to have a lot of emails, and they breathlessly, anxiously, claustrophobically say, "When am I going to get my work done?" Then, mid-afternoon, an email comes along from someone that requires a big amount of work and immediately, the spiral of not feeling resilient starts, because how can any of us cope with this situation when we aren't in command, if we don't have the autonomy to do things.  And it's pretty much the biggest predictor of wellbeing, bar none, is a sense of control.  And we can create the illusion from it as well.  There are examples where animals are given a degree of control, and it improves their sense of experience, or our own stress levels can be reduced if we chew gum.  Actually, there's really good examples of how we mitigate against these things. But pretty much a lack of control has a huge impact on our wellbeing.  The way of thinking about it is, it's got a domino effect.  So, if you've got a parent who has a job with no control, they generally become controlling of their children. Helen Tupper: I was scared by that when I read that, that they go home and they kind of take that need into their home and into their family. Bruce Daisley: The one thing that's very common amongst school bullies is that they've got authoritarian parents, specifically fathers.  So school bullies, now gosh, that kid that behaved in that abominable way, actually you see not only the crime, you see the causes of crime.  It's like, "Wow, these things are passed forwards".  So, if we find ourselves with no control, it has I think this dominating, holistic experience over us.  It really makes us feel like we can't cope with a situation. So, if you're going to make one thing change, then you might say, "If I'm feeling no autonomy at work, is there something I could do to reduce the amount of time I'm spending in meetings?  Is there something I could do to set some time aside to do something separate?"  The illusion of modern work is we all feel like we've got infinite time, and we'll just answer this, then I'll answer this, and if I just need to work later, I'll work later; and we never make decisions of scarcity.  But I guess one of the critical things you'd say is, if people are feeling an absence of control, if people are feeling no resilience, then thinking about how you can gift them some space, and there's a solution to it as well. If you look at nurses, so nurses were tracked, a really interesting study, nurses were tracked and working long shifts and night shifts, day shifts.  What they discovered was, the more that the nurse felt that they'd chosen to work extra hours, the more able they were able to assimilate it.  So, you might hear this from people who run their own businesses, you hear, "Burnout doesn't really apply to me, I can work as long as I want".  There does seem to be something that at least in the short term is protective of us.  If we feel like we've chosen to do this longer shift, or we've done extra overtime because it's paying for a holiday, then it seems like our mind protects us a bit, it allows us to feel we are in control, we've chosen to do it. So, it helps me understand, when people have said to me, "Burnout doesn't apply to me, I can work as long as I want", it sounds like at least in the short term, that explains it.  When we feel like we've got the autonomy to make that decision, it seems to help. Sarah Ellis: It really makes me think about how important it is to check in with the people that work within your teams, in terms of how much control do you feel you have with your week at the moment?  What gets in the way of that control?  How can I help to increase your control?  Do you feel like you can make choices about what you work on and how you work? I was doing some walk-and-talks with our team this week, and I always ask everything, "What are you enjoying most at the moment; what gives you the most energy?" and it was interesting that the first thing everyone in the team talked about was how they work, rather than what they work on; so, this sense of, "I feel like I have choice and control over how I work, and if that means I want to volunteer for my kid's swimming, I just make that happen", and how much they appreciated almost not feeling like they had to tell us, or hopefully not having that micromanagement. I think sometimes we have the freedom, hopefully, to be able to do that, because we're a small company, but I do think there are levels of that.  And even in really big companies, you have that ability as a manager to make a real difference in that area of choice and control. Bruce Daisley: Well, a perfect example to add to precisely what you're saying is, there was an article in Harvard Business Review a couple of months ago, and I know you get a couple of free articles a month, so they could go and read your latest piece and then read this one! Sarah Ellis: Oh, Bruce! Helen Tupper: Thanks, Bruce! Bruce Daisley: But there's an article out meeting-free days, and it's worth reading, because companies introduced meeting-free days, and 70 organisations did it, they had to have at least 1,000 employees, so these weren't small, cottage industries.  What they discovered by introducing meeting-free days was, and this was specifically no standing meetings, so you and I could meet for a coffee, I could have lunch with Helen, or we could grab a quick chat together.  But people described their engagement with their job went up about 27%, their level of exhaustion went down, because felt like, "I'm making the decisions myself".  Just that simple exercise of giving people just a bit of flexibility to feel like they're in control helped mitigate and push back against that. Sarah Ellis: So, just thinking a little bit about identity, and we've mentioned it already, but one of the things that we've talked about before on the podcast is this idea of enmeshment, which is essentially when your identity isn't distinct from your job, so the work you do becomes who you are.  And, there's some real dangers to that, because with our blurred boundaries, and when we are all probably working longer than before, there's certainly no evidence that people are working shorter that I've seen, this feels like it continues to be a risk. You mentioned a researcher called Ericsson, who talks about how important our sense of identity is in terms of providing us with our ability to see ourselves in the same way with continuity, but something that's separate to the work that we do, or maybe the family that we're part of; we have this own sense of self.  I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how that helps us to be resilient and to have that fortitude, and I think probably the killer question, and it might be an impossible one is, if you don't feel like you've got that, what do we do about it? So, if someone is listening and feeling like, "Maybe I don't, maybe I just feel like I'm here for my family and I'm here for my work", you know when you feel like you're split in loads of different directions?  I hear that from lots of people, that they don't really feel like they have any time for them, and I think this goes way beyond self-care, the sense of self.  So, interested in your reflections about what you found out; but also, if someone isn't feeling that connection to sense of self, what might you do and where might you go? Bruce Daisley: Yeah, and I think we can see how identity is definitely a conflicted part of this, because for some of the people concerned, channelling everything into accomplishment for identity can prove enriching, but also incredibly endangering.  From quotations that we see, Simone Biles, the American Gymnast, during the course of the Olympics, she was probably expected to win at least four gold medals, she end up winning, I think, one silver medal and maybe a bronze as well; she said, during the course of what was effectively quite a public breakdown, she said she was very grateful for the praise she received by coming clean on mental health issues, because until now, she'd seen herself merely in the fact that she was an accomplished athlete. Naomi Osaka, tennis player, has said she's asked herself, "What am I if I'm not a tennis player?"  Through that, you can really see the dangers of enmeshment, because we see ourselves thinking, "I'm a provider for my family [or] I'm someone who's going to work hard and make my mum proud of what I accomplish at work [or] I'm going to be able to get the money for a deposit on a flat because I'm striving so hard".  We see all of these things as a way to paint this redemptive image of ourselves. The danger of that is that when that fails, it's potentially, in the case of those athletes vividly shows, it's potentially a risk.  So, I think identity can be incredibly propelling for us, it can be incredibly motivating; but also, that enmeshment I think is a genuine risk, a genuine exposure.  So, I think it demonstrates how challenging this is.  But there's no doubt whatsoever that the thing that these victims of trauma have all got is that they've been able to focus their energy into that, and have accomplished at elite level as a result of it really. Sarah Ellis: Yeah, it's quite a conflicting area, isn't it? Bruce Daisley: It really is. Sarah Ellis: Like you say, they've been very successful, certainly if you look at them through one lens, but then you do question whether that success equals meaning or happiness.  And I even recognise it even at a very, you know, we're not Olympic gymnasts, but a really big part of my identity is the work that I do, and that has been the case for a very, very long time. So, even as you were talking there, I was imagining, and I think sometimes this can actually be quite useful to do, "What would happen if Amazing If closed tomorrow?" and you're like, "Crikey, that's such a big part of my identity and who I am, and I now work with my best friend", and all of those kinds of things, "What would happen to our friendship?  What would happen to how other people see me?", and you've got quite a public profile that people see. That's where I think it's worth reminding yourself of even in that worst-case scenario, "I still love to play netball, I've still got a son and a family that I love very much", and almost I think that worst-case scenario planning, alongside that zooming out, to just remind yourself as well not to forget about those other things.  I've had the odd moment in my career where I was so focused on work that if that had gone wrong, and fortunately it didn't, I don't think I would have been left with very much. Whereas actually I think, and I remember talking to Martha Lane-Fox about this; she talked to me when we'd interviewed her about resilience, and I said to her, "What's helped you be the most resilient?" and she's sold companies, she had to relearn to walk after a very bad car accident.  She said, "It was never forgetting my world outside of work", that was her single thing.  She loved going to the theatre, she's got twins, but she was just always, it's not about a work-life balance, it's something more than that.  It was just that sense of, "I am a number of different people all at the same time.  Just be careful you don't become one part of that picture".  I just find it a really useful reminder. Bruce Daisley: Probably one of the most gobsmacking interviews I did for the book was chatting to an assistant professor, who was studying the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes, so that's an interesting thing.  That's an illustration of an area where focus on identity might meander into something that we consider morally unjustifiable. What he said is that, he gave me some stats that were astonishing.  Anyone who'd been I think physically abused was nine times more likely, as a professional athlete, to take performance-enhancing drugs; and anyone who'd been sexually abused was about eight times more likely, and these are multiplicative.  So, if someone has been physically and sexually abused, they're massively more likely to take performance-enhancing drugs. What you get then, you get into stories of, okay, right, so here's an interesting profile, that all of these people who won gold medals, and I'm not pointing this specifically at British athletes, but people who won gold medals were trying to resurrect a shattered sense of self.  And we also know that people who've had a shattered sense of self might consider that they will restore their sense of self-belief at all costs. So then, if we're trying to empathise with an athlete, who maybe has taken performance-enhancing drugs, we have to start from a position of thinking, "This was a broken person who did something as an act of self-healing", rather than a nasty person who set out -- Sarah Ellis: Who's cheating. Bruce Daisley: -- to cheat, "I'm going to cheat".  This was someone who felt reduced, humiliated.  The word you hear through people who've suffered trauma is "shattered", shattered sense of identity.  These are people who feel like they've only accomplished any degree of self-worth through what they've been able to accomplish on the sports track. So, not remotely thinking about any of the people we've talked about before, but you can definitely see an example is Marion Jones, who was probably one of the most accomplished American sportspeople, has won 100 metres, 200 metres, I think long jump as well, and she was caught taking drugs.  She'd suffered parental abandonment, she'd suffered her mum's new partner died, she'd suffered all series of traumas, and I think people who've looked at it have said, actually this huge hole was excavated inside of her, this void, this sense that she felt -- the way that kids interpret things, they think, "This happened because of me.  If it wasn't for me, this wouldn't have happened". So, people seek to fill that void that trauma's created, by the actions they take.  And I think through all of that, we can see, to your point there, that identity can be this really powerful motivating factor, but it also can be this incredible tinderbox that can really be an explosive combination inside of us. Helen Tupper: So, on those three foundations of fortitude, we've covered control, we've talked about identity, and the third one is community; and I think this is the biggest "A-ha!" moment for me in the book, because to your point about resilience and individualism and all that kind of stuff, "Go focus on this alone and put your mindset right, and you'll be fine with resilience"; actually a lot of what you cover in the book is the importance of the relationships you have around you, the role of community in that. I guess there are two parts to my question, as I was reading it and thinking it, I was like, "I'd love Bruce to tell us a little bit about that, so that other people can learn about it", because I think it is so fundamental to fortitude, and it's new knowledge for me.  And the second thing that was in my mind whilst I was reading it was the idea of "we" in the workplace now.  If community is so important, and the way that work is going, how do we keep community with the way that we're working now? So, I think they're probably two quite big questions, but community and fortitude, let's explore that so other people can learn about it.  And then, the way that work works now, what do we need to change so that we have the community that we need? Bruce Daisley: There's a wonderful guy who passed away a couple of years ago, called Enrico Quarantelli, and Enrico Quarantelli was obsessed with natural disasters and when things went wrong.  It's almost like, if you've got an earthquake or people flying out of somewhere, he was the lone car driving in the other direction.  He was obsessed with going to see when things went wrong. He spotted this weird trend that our expectation might be, because we've seen disaster movies, that something goes wrong, a building's on fire, an earthquake happens, that what we're going to see is loads of people screaming and running with their arms waving in the air.  He said it's the exact opposite.  What you find, whether it's 9/11, whether it's the aftermath of a terrorist attack in London, whether it's a natural disaster, whether it's a flood somewhere; what you find is people immediately, their individual identities are actually swept away. The Blitz spirit is a good illustration of it, "I'm no longer this Financial-Times-reading, bowler-hat-wearing businessman, I'm now adjacent to this person who's next to me on this street.  We've got this new shared identity which is, we're bomb blast survivors", or you know, remarkable things in the testimony of survivors of 9/11.  And one woman says really vividly, "Everyone who was on the streets on 9/11 had a calm to them, had a community, a sort of sorority, a brotherhood, where they were buying things for each other, they were doing things for each other. Everyone who watched it on TV, they just saw the trauma and the repeated trauma of this shocking event, and they were hysterical.  And it was a really interesting juxtaposition.  Another good example, there's a woman who became very famous in 9/11 as the dust lady, and it's a very vivid story with a tragic ending, where this woman, who was around 30, and she was photographed consumed, covered in dust like a statue, and she went on to pass away, largely because she had no health insurance, and she'd consumed a lot of, I think, carcinogenic materials during that. But if you compare her experience to police officers and firefighters who served that day, when police officers were surveyed a few years later, the vast majority of them were regarded to have fully recovered from the experience, firefighters the same, fully recovered.  Now, they might have had illness related to what they consumed that day, but mentally they were #resilient, you know, they'd got through it.  Whereas, Marcy Borders, because she experienced her trauma of that alone, she lost her job, she sat at home, she said she sat at home drinking and taking drugs, her isolation, in the same way that that community protected those serving members of the forces, her isolation was what separated her.  And this isn't just a one-off, this is repeated. We see really consistent examples of firstly, people draw a strength from a crowd, they draw a strength from feeling connected to strangers around them.  And secondly, when we do see our own identities reflected in other people, so, "You and I have just been through this experience", we might talk about this building that collapsed around us more than anyone who knows us would ever want to listen to.  We find we talk about, talk about, talk about.  Processing that is an important part of us coming to terms with it, and everyone else, because they won't understand it, we tend to hide that. What you find throughout stories of trauma, you find that people start hiding that aspect of the trauma, they conceal it.  Trauma is generally about the lack of self-revealing, the feeling that you've got something that you don't want to expose to other people.  And that connectedness of community is where we feel that we are understood by another person and they understand us, and it seems to be incredibly protective. Now, thinking specifically about the moment we're in with work, there's this one common thing that runs across this sense of community, and it's a sense that we're all in it together.  When we feel a sense that we're all in it together, it seems to be incredibly enriching.  In fact, you can witness examples in society.  When it looks like, during COVID we're all in it together, the Queen's sitting on her own at her husband's funeral; when we're all in it together, it seems like this is a collective effort.  When we start seeing people who don't look like they're in it together with us, that's when we get affronted, when we get annoyed, frustrated that, "Why are they not doing it?  Why is that family not doing it?"  We feel it breaks this bond, the affinity we've got. I think the most critical thing for work right now is that a lot of us have thought, the amount of organisations I've chatted to who say, "We've got this policy of three days a week or two days a week", and then when you chat to the workers, they're like, "Well, we're not doing those days".  So many firms are really struggling to get people to come in the amount of days they want, and it's the wrong focus, to some extent.  The focus needs to be, "How do we make people feel like they're part of something?"  That might be one day a month, two days a month, where there's something meaningful, where you're sharing ideas together, where people feel like their voice is being heard, where you're talking about the plan for the next quarter, and everyone feels like, "My idea's up on the board".  Those things are far more meaningful for us, feeling like we're all in this together. We sort of recognise this, you can feel part of your family or you can feel part of a friendship group, or you might have friends from university, where you've stayed together.  And if you feel like the relationship's been respected, if you feel like, "Actually, I feel like this relationship still exists and I'm participating in it", it doesn't necessarily matter how often you see people, but more the sense that everyone's servicing the relationships.  I think we've lost sight of that, to some extent. Helen Tupper: It's actually really interesting listening to you saying that, because I had in my mind, "Is there a bit of a tension between control and community in the workplace?"  So, control might mean I get to work in a way that works for me.  But if you are doing that and Sarah's doing that, then when are we coming together as a community?  But actually, your point is, you can still work in a way that works for you, but what we need is, community is not just being in the same room together, it's having a reason to be in the same room together that's worth it and better because of that. If we can find the reason why it's best to be together and we're all committed to that, then that's the reason for a community to form.  But just bringing people back on a random day of the week, just to look in your screen so that you can all be at the same place, but in a virtual meeting with some people that aren't in the same place, that doesn't really work.  You need a reason to be a community that people want to be part of, and then they can still have their control, and you can still have meaningful community.  But I think it's an interesting tension that I hadn't really thought about, because I hadn't explored before the role of community in resilience quite so much. Bruce Daisley: I hosted a roundtable of people who were coming back to the office yesterday, and I'm always interested, "What's your policy?"  What you find is that a lot of organisations have got three days a week as a policy, and then you say to them, "And, how many days on average are people averaging?"  "Oh, some people are not coming in at all.  Most people are averaging one day a week".  "So, how many people were in on Monday?"  "We had no one in this week on Monday".  "Okay, how many people came in on Friday?"  "We had three people in on Friday". So, we're starting to learn that there's intention paths of what people are actually doing, and I think it undermines a firm's credibility firstly when it's three days a week, and no one's doing the three days a week.  But it's also missing something, because people say to me, "Oh yeah, I made the journey in, I didn't see anyone from my team.  I had a bit of a chat with people".  It's missing the objective.  Now, I love, I don't know if I put it in the book actually, the phrase "simcha"? Helen Tupper: No, I don't think so. Bruce Daisley: Okay, by the former Chief Rabbi of the UK, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.  He was talking about this word that when it's in the Bible, it's translated as "joy".  But he says, "You miss a nuance with that.  It's not joy, it's shared joy".  So, simcha might be us getting together and singing, or listening to music together, or having dinner together and laughing. Helen Tupper: I do all of those things! Bruce Daisley: Okay!  Well, normally when any of us think about the most meaningful moments that we've experienced, or the most meaningful accomplishments in a job, they're generally not, "I did this on my own".  It's normally, they've got a degree of simcha to them.  So, it might be the celebration of something big you did, or the recognition you got for something big you did, rather than the mere act of accomplishing it.  As soon as you recognise that you go, "Oh, okay, I really recognise that". Firstly, it means being more intentional about creating a beautifully created dinner.  A good example for you, that if you had university friends gathering, you wouldn't say, "I'll tell you what we'll do, we're meeting Tuesday at Zizzi, we're going to have a pizza", and that's it.  You'd say, "Okay, we're going away for a weekend, we've booked this restaurant, dress up for the Saturday night", why?  Because it's being a bit more intentional about creating a moment that's got simcha, that's got a memorability to it, and I think that's where we need to get to. I attribute one guy with some of the problems that we're having right now.  So, there's a guy, a brilliant professor, called Professor Nick Bloom, and he has had the ear of a lot of firms.  He's, for a long time, been saying, "Three days a week in the office", and it's why Google has Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; it's why Apple has Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and it's proved incredibly unpopular.  So now, he's pulled back a bit and said, "Maybe it's two days a week". The problem is, for a lot of people, they've already tried this three days a week and it was awful.  They're either in back-to-back video calls, or there's just no energy to it, and to some extent, we're running the risk of making the office seem like this desolate, lifeless place where you're forced to go, rather than an experiential thing, a place where you get together very clearly because we're going to do this, and there's going to be some good energy that comes from it, and I think that's one of the challenges of the moment we're in. Sarah Ellis: So, Bruce, thank you.  It's been a fascinating conversation today, as I knew it would be, and a challenging one, as we also knew it would be.  But we always finish these conversations with the same question, which we're really interested to know, what's the most useful piece of career advice that you would like to share with our listeners and leave our listeners with?  This could be a useful piece of career advice that you've been given and that you want to pass on and share what you know, so that we can all succeed; or perhaps just some words of wisdom for you. Bruce Daisley: The one thing I would say is that sometimes being memorable, or distinctive, is more valuable than you think.  Specifically, I got my job through doing a cartoon CV.  We were just talking actually about two writers who use a different form to express their work: illustrations.  Because of that, it just stands out in actually a very cluttered, commoditised space.  But the fact that they've got something different makes them really stand out far more than maybe they would in any other way.  And my cartoon CV got me a job, no doubt. So, I always used to think, "If I was a kid now applying for a job, I would put my CV on a balloon and send it to someone's office, I would send a polaroid of me making a cup of tea".  Most people, at work now, they receive no physical mail.  So, you've got basically a whole lane of the motorway that if you want to communicate with someone, you've got a whole lane of the motorway that is completely uncrowded.  If you create something that is beautiful, memorable, thoughtful, personal that lands on that, you've got a way of communicating that no one is using whatsoever. Their phone is cluttered with 10 apps with 15 different notifications, and the one day in the week that they come into the office, that's probably this weird day, if you've got something waiting for them there, it just stands out in this remarkable way.  If someone invented this today, you'd be going, "I can't believe this thing, and it's not cluttered". So my view is always, what can you do that -- my cartoon CV was really terrible, it was so poor quality; I'm embarrassed to show kids if I do talks at schools, because it's so of its time.  But just a reminder from me that you don't necessarily have to be the best for it.  Why that worked, the cartoon worked, is because it felt really personal, it felt it could only have come from this person, it was very human, it had a degree of self-deprecating, and it just made people smile.  Actually, that thing where someone's smiling, they're emotionally pulling for you. Doing something that stands out and makes people pull for you is incredibly potent, I think; that's what I would say.  Whereas, sometimes we can get so consumed with, "Okay, well everyone's doing this and I've got to do this".  The first thing I always say to kids at school is that, "You've got to create a CV.  What do you do?  Well, you go to Google, obviously; and what do you do?  You search CV, obviously; and what do you do?  Click on the first link, obviously".  That's what everyone did, "Okay, is it any surprise that your CV looks exactly the same as everyone else's CV?" Then you're like, "Okay, what are the little steps along the way doing that that aren't that?" and that's why these people who do the illustrations in their book, or they're often simple things.  And the moment you see it, you go, "Oh yeah, of course, that's obvious".  None of these things feel like someone's invented the iPhone, they're not genius flashes of inspiration.  So, all I would think is, are there little things that you could do that probably are your strength, or something that's a bit more you, that might enable you to show you as a real person. Helen Tupper: Thank you, Bruce, for your advice, and we are working on a Squiggly CV, so everyone can have an individual way to share what they've done and what they want to do in the future.  But thank you so much for your advice there and for talking to us about Fortitude.  We loved it, and I think as Sarah said, we both took different things from it, but have both learnt a lot because of it.  So, thank you.  Where can everybody else go and get Fortitude, how can they pre-order it; where should they go first? Bruce Daisley: I mean, look, go to your local bookshop and order it, go on.  That's what I would say, but obviously it's available in all the places.  I did the audiobook last week, maybe caused myself a breakdown!  It's long.  I was called back for repeat sessions in hot weather; they didn't turn the aircon on!  But yeah, I've been really blown away with the response, so I've got lovely quotations from people.  I was chatting to someone from Voice of America last week who said it was her favourite book of 2022, so I was so blown away by someone who was so well-rounded who said that, so some lovely comments along the way. Sarah Ellis: And I would just do a quick shoutout for Bruce's newsletter, Make Work Better. Bruce Daisley: That's right. Sarah Ellis: It's on my "must-read newsletter" list, of which there are lots of newsletters, but it's probably the one that I always make time for, but it's also definitely the one that I recommend the most to other people.  So, if you don't subscribe to that, and you're interested in just how we can make work better, how we can create really positive cultures, and just all do work that we enjoy, I'd really encourage you to check it out, because I find it very useful. Helen Tupper: And we'll put the links to that, and the links to Bruce's book to pre-order in the show notes.  So, make sure you check that out. Sarah Ellis: Thanks, Bruce. Bruce Daisley: Thank you so much.