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Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. We talked last week about how humans have two really important needs. Psychologists teach us that we have a need for safety and security, and that we also have a need for growth and exploration. And in order to be well, we, we really need to have both of these needs met. We talked about how you can meet both of these needs in long-term relationships last week, but I wanna talk about these needs in the context of work this week. There's a lot of work that we end up having to do in our lives, whether it's paid or unpaid work, that we have to do in order to have safety and security, in order to have an income, in order to have a roof over our heads, in order to have food that we need. But this work can a lot of times be repetitive and dull and stultifying. And how can that work also be a source for growth and exploration. If, if we're gonna be well, we really need to be able to have both of these needs met. Well, there's actually a way to be able to meet both your needs for safety and security and your needs for growth and exploration, even in a context where work is repetitive and uninteresting. Again, a lot of this information comes from a book called Curious by Todd Kashdan, who is a psychologist who runs a a, a research lab at George Mason University.

But there are three things that you can do to transform the work that you do, even if it's mindless and boring, into something that can be a source for interest and growth and exploration. So the first key is to look for the unfamiliar in the familiar. And let me tell you about a study that he talks about in his book where people were asked to do something that they disliked doing, but they were asked to do this thing while looking for something specific. They needed to look for three things that were novel or unfamiliar in this task. So, for example, there was an 18-year-old bodybuilder and he ended up, his task that he chose to do that he disliked was crochet. And the three things that he discovered in it that were novel or un unfamiliar were one that he discovered that it could be tiring. He under underestimated how fit his fingers were or unfit his fingers were for the, for the task, so he discovered it could be tiring. He just, he discovered that it could be meditative. He said that the time flew by quickly, and he also discovered that the stitches could actually be tight enough to make flip flops. So the people had to do something that they disliked, look for these three novel things and tell the researchers about these three novel things. Well, a few weeks later, the researchers contacted the subjects again, and the people who had been asked to look for these three novel things in this task that they disliked, they were more likely to have done it again on their own without anybody asking or prodding them to do it. This is really important because it means that the task, which formerly they had not liked to do, after looking for novel aspects of it and talking about them to the researchers, the person liked it enough to wanna do it on their own when nobody was looking and nobody was asking them to do it. They actually found something in it that interested them and compelled them to be attracted to it again. So this is really amazing. This means that we can apply this to even mundane work that we have to do every day that we don't enjoy. There was another example of a woman who hated to do laundry. Dr. Kashdan asked her to do laundry the next time and just look for novel things about it when she did it. And it completely transformed her experience of doing laundry. It became a different experience. So she turned off the TV so that she could focus on the novel aspects of this act. And she started noticing how her hands felt at felt as she was folding the clothes and how they became dry and how her nose started to itch. And she started to think about the fabrics, notice the fabrics in the clothes, and how they didn't really seem to reflect her personality. They seemed to be stiff, tough fabrics, and she was kind of more of a quiet, flexible person. And she started thinking about the process that went into her choosing these clothes that didn't seem to fit her personality. Anyway, it became a totally different experience. So this seems like maybe not a big deal, but it, it changed her experience of washing clothes. We've talked from the beginning of this podcast about how your emotions are not determined by the situation that you're in. And we know this because two people can be in the same situation and have a completely different emotional experience. Emotions are really organized by the way that your brain interprets the situation, the way that your brain tells a story about how the situation is going to affect my concerns. And there's always another way of looking at things. There are always certain things that we're paying a lot of attention to and other things that we are ignoring. And Dr. Kashdan talks about how there's always something that's interesting in this mundane task that you are ignoring or missing. In his book, Curious dr. Kashdan talks about how curiosity is a fundamental human need in the sense that it really is a, a deal breaker as to whether or not we feel well, we feel good, we feel wellbeing in our lives. It, it increases our health, our intelligence, it gives us better social relationships. It gives us more happiness, more of a sense of meaning. So there are ways to increase your curiosity and interest, even in the familiar and the mundane by just looking for some novel features. And this, this research that I just talked about shows how it changes the emotional experience of the person. Moves it from being a task that they do not like to do toward being a task that is interesting enough that they actually want to do it again for fun on their own. So that's one thing that you can remember about how to transform the unpleasant work that you have to do in your life into something interesting, that is a trigger for growth. Look for the unfamiliar in the familiar. Look for the novel in the mundane.

The second thing that you can do is to look for ways to bring challenge into it. So a lot of times when we have a mindless task, it's boring. It's totally uninteresting. We already know everything about it. And so it's, it's an unpleasant experience to engage in it. But it can be transformed if we can find ways to bring complexity and challenge into it. Here's an example. This is from the book. A guy named Fred who was a janitor at Grand Central Station in New York. Imagine the unpleasantness, repetitiveness of his job. He gets the station clean to perfection, and it's undone the next minute by careless commuters and the bodily fluids of homeless people, and he just has to do it all over again. But he invented a way to bring complexity into his job. What did he do? He started timing his performance on each task. So let's say he's gotta mop the floor in a specific room. He would time his performance and he would write it down in a notebook. So he kept a tally of his best times and he was always trying to beat his best times. And if there were people in his way or there was an especially terrible mess to be cleaned up, he would give himself, um, handicap points to make up for the increased difficulty level. So he was, he was constantly adjusting the difficulty level according to the task, in order to be able to measure each task in an equal way. And so, of course, this made his job a lot more interesting. His coworkers at first laughed at him for what he was doing, but pretty soon they started keeping some of their own tallies as well. And they would tease each other and compete for the top scores. And they would trade stories about obnoxious people and grotesque handicaps. In a work environment where people used to all just work alone, now there was a lot of playful interactions and playful competing with each other, which provided a lot more vitality and gave them more initiative for completing their tasks. So this is a cool way that he transformed a, a really repetitive and seemingly unfulfilling job, boring job into something interesting and playful. Before I ever read this, this book, I did something like this intuitively when my kids were little and I seemed to have an endless supply of dishes to do. Dishes were one particular thing that I really didn't enjoy doing, but I started playing this game with myself. I would look at this impossibly dirty kitchen and I would set a timer for 10 minutes, and I would try and see how much of it I could clean up in 10 minutes. I told myself I could quit after 10 minutes. But I found I would get working so fast and I, I developed these different streamlined methods that would get it done even quicker. And, and I, and I got really motivated to see how quickly I could get things cleaned up. And I usually found that within 10 minutes I could turn a really daunting and impossibly messy ki kitchen into a clean kitchen. And it became interesting and fun for me. So that's the second thing you can do, is to find ways to bring challenge into the work, and that can provide this source of growth and exploration, even in a repetitive, mindless, boring task. So find some way to make some kind of a game out of it.

And the third thing goes back to something we've been talking about quite a bit in our recent podcast, which is to find a way to connect it to your values. So we've talked about how your values are like the direction that you wanna go in your life. Life is like you being in a boat out in the middle of the ocean. When you know what your values are, you know what direction you want the boat to point. You know which direction you want it to go. When you take actions in line with your values, then you are moving in that direction that you have chosen to go. And so when you can connect these mindless unrewarding tasks to this, a greater direction that you want your life to go, then they can start to feel fulfilling and interesting, and you can start to feel motivated to do them in a way that you weren't before you connected them to your values. When we're doing something that feels like it's not important to us and it's not connected to our values, then it feels like we're on a boat that is going in the direction that we do not wanna go in our lives. It feels suffocating. It feels frustrating. But instead when we can connect it to our values and we can see that this particular uninteresting task is actually moving us in the direction that we want our lives to go, then all of a sudden it becomes something freely chosen, something important, something interesting. We get more creative about how to solve the problems involved in it. Connecting it to our values gives us a whole bunch of resources that we didn't have access to before. But most of all, it makes it more interesting. So connecting it to your values is really about finding your why. Finding why it is that you're doing this thing. So maybe I'm doing the dishes because it's really important to me to feed my kids and care for them regularly, give them regular meals, and part of that involves cleaning up afterwards. And so I can see how it's moving me toward this in value of caring for my kids. Or maybe I'm going to work and I'm doing this particular unpleasant task at work because it's helping to create something that contributes to making the world a better place in a way that's important to me. Or maybe just doing this mindless task that I have to do, irritating, unpleasant task that I have to do at work, maybe it's just giving me money so that I can then use that money to do things that are important to me. In all of these examples, the Unpleasant task is connected to the values of the person in the story and the unpleasant task is seen as something that is moving the person in the direction that they want to go. And we've talked a few times in the past episodes about how, how wellbeing and satisfaction and fulfillment and, and long-term happiness doesn't come from pursuing that feeling of happiness. But it comes from acting in line with your values. So when you can connect this unpleasant task to your values and the direction that you wanna go, then it becomes something that moves you in that direction of your values, and it becomes a source of satisfaction and fulfillment. All you've gotta do to access happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment is to be moving in the direction of your values. You don't have to have reached one, a particular goal or another on the the journey, you just have to be moving in that direction that you have chosen, that you have identified as important to you.

So these are three things that you can look at incorporating into your unpleasant, mindless, irritating, repetitive work that you've gotta do in your life, whether paid or unpaid. First of all, look for novelty, meaning look for the unfamiliar in the familiar. Find three things in your day that are novel about this particular kind of work that you've got to do and then write about it, report about it. That's one of the, that's one of the really important things from that example that we talked about. The participants found the novel things and then they, they had to talk about it to the researchers. If you don't write about it or talk about it, then your brain's not going to notice it as much. So write them down or even just record them into your phone, but find three novel things every day. You can ask yourself what's novel about my coworker's attitude today? What's novel about how my body is working or feeling today? What's novel about this assignment in front of me? It doesn't matter what it is, you just find three novel things and then report on them. So that was the first thing. Look for novelty. Second thing was to bring challenge into it. Find a way to make a game out of it, find a way to make it more complex, more challenging in the way that Fred did with his job at Grand Central Station. And the third is to connect it to your values, to find your why, so that you can feel that this task is moving you in the direction that you want to go, and all of a sudden it will become an interesting task. You will be, feel more motivated to do it. You'll have more persistence at it, more grit. You'll have more creativity in solving the problems involved in it. Your interest and your effort will intensify simply from connecting it to your values. And it will, because the interest intensifies, then it becomes this source of exploration.

So these are three ways that you can find both security and safety from the work that you've gotta do that gives you your basic needs, but also find a source of growth and exploration, which is another basic need for wellbeing. So I hope that helps. Thanks for tuning in today, and we'll see you next week.