Wisdom in fragments

I believe that the entrepreneurial life, even when running a large company, is a dual experience of joy and pain—two sides of the same coin. The joy lies in putting yourself out there and leading an organisation in a specific direction, but with that comes the burden of responsibility.

Founder and former CEO of Panera Bread Company

Think about how that feels when you're told that for this essential skill that is part of the astronaut job, you're not needed. It's as if they were saying, 'You don't bring anything essential and we won't miss you.' That encouragement pushed me to show up to spacewalking meetings I wasn't initially invited to.

NASA Astronaut & Space Shuttle Mission Specialist

I told them, 'My mom is visiting from Ohio today. If you can look her in the eye and tell her it's impossible to build a place for me to stay on the space station during my mission, then we're done here. If not, we have more to discuss.' They suggested my mom come to dinner instead, and we ended up going to Home Depot together.

NASA Astronaut & Space Shuttle Mission Specialist

I believe that a mission can be something grand, but it doesn't have to be. Many people say, 'I'm just busy living my life, and I don't have time for some grand mission.' But I think a mission is present for almost everyone if they take the time to look for it. I think that if you care about something, then you have a mission.

NASA Astronaut & Space Shuttle Mission Specialist

Mental resilience is supported by practice and preparation, but it also comes from knowing, deep down, that you're supposed to be where you are. Confidence in your purpose is crucial. By focusing on the next step, and then the one after that, while keeping the big picture in mind, you can effectively accomplish the mission.

NASA Astronaut & Space Shuttle Mission Specialist

Everyone has important skills and likely unique skills, but they may not always be as confident in those skills as they should be. We need to challenge the notion that if you don't feel like a superhero, then you must not be the right person for the job. Being underestimated in that way often brings out the best in me. For me, it's not just about overcoming insecurity but leveraging it as a catalyst to ensure that I bring everything I have to the mission.

NASA Astronaut & Space Shuttle Mission Specialist

How many CEOs or heads of government agencies have taken the trouble today to say, 'Who are my five most-thoughtful antagonists? How have I reached out to them, and what efforts do I have in place to create a listening community across those antagonists for when I really need it when the crisis hits?'

If you're managing that way in the age of outrage, basically you're saying your organization will be in constant firefighting mode. That's unsustainable. The organization will very quickly wither and die.

Managing in the age of outrage is not the same as managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management—you can turn it over to a part of the organization that's pro at it and then get on with your day. It's firefighting.

The idea that you will sit down with someone who's had 30 or 40 years of lived experience in a particular situation, and has been conditioned to analyze the world that way, and then somehow get them to change their mind in one sitting is implausible.

One of the best analogies I've heard in this scenario is that, just as you wouldn't want a surgeon to go from one operating theater to the next without having washed their hands, you don't want a manager to go from one context to the next without being in a position where they can actually do some good—or at least do no harm.

One is: Do I trust you with my feelings? Do I think that you're going to be a listener who is non-judgmental, or do I think you're going to judge me—'Marc is weak because he's anxious,' or 'Marc is a man and he's feeling sad; dudes don't feel sad.' So if I think you're going to judge me for my feelings, I'm going to be much more guarded about whether or not I express them.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Depression is depression. Despair is despair. Disappointment is disappointment, and I think it's important for us to have that emotional granularity. Because if I just walk around like the world is right now, 'I'm anxious, I'm anxious,' but I have a hard time believing that everyone is that anxious. I think it's because we don't have granularity in our understanding of emotions, and so we're not communicating our true experiences accurately.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

We tend to go deeper with that in terms of specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. And I think what's important to know there is that we often make a lot of mistakes when we're reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values, our own belief systems, and we oftentimes project emotions onto people as opposed to really knowing how they're feeling.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

Because it's giving us information about how we're feeling and what we need to do about those feelings. When I'm looking at your facial expressions, I get signals—like either you're interested or you're bored. Either you want me to keep going or not. And that's data for me. Because if I notice a shift in the way you're engaging with me while I'm speaking, I could either use that information, or I could keep going and going and going, and then lose my audience.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

I think this goes into the history of psychology; for example, 100 years ago, we couldn't even measure what an emotion is. It's something in your head and in your brain, and we were always used to measuring behaviour, not people's psychological experiences. So just from that alone, it became less important because it wasn't observable behaviour, as if what people are thinking and feeling doesn't matter—which is obviously crazy; it does matter.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence