Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:52:01 · Becky Kennedy
[00:52:01] S1: I think that's exactly right. And I think we can all think back on our life. And again, you rarely say thank you to these people, but if you think back on really hard moments, or I don't know, if I was out of control at some party, and I don't know, I was being mean to people, I was saying awful things. Who knows? Maybe someone's drunk. An act of love in that moment would be, at least if it was me and my husband, picking me up and carrying me out, kind of like, "I'm not going to let you self-destruct." And if I was like, "No, I'm fine," I might even look back later and think, "Why did you let me make that decision?" I'll share a story, because some of this comes from it. I think about this teenager I was working with in private practice and she came to me, I'm just doing a first session, "Okay, tell me what to bring you here." She's like, "Well, you can see on my arms, I'm cutting." I was like, "Okay, keep going." And I was like, "Well, how long have you been doing that? " She goes, "Two years." And I said, "You just said I'm the first therapist you've ever seen. So what's gone on in the last two years?" She was so snarky. And she goes, "Oh, wow. My parents tried me to send me to a therapist two years ago, but I said to them, "Oh, so you think I'm the messed up one in the family, and you can send me. I'm just going to lie the whole time and waste your money." My heart always races when I think about this moment. It's so visceral still. And something in me, I don't know, I was on my game that day. I was like, "Becky, just be quiet. Don't say anything." And I don't know, 10, 15 seconds later, everything changed for her. She looked down, and then she looked up, and she just goes, "Can you believe they let me make that decision?" She felt so betrayed and so not taken care of. And it just made me realize, at our worst moments, first of all, at our worst moments we speak, I think, our fears, not our wishes, Number One. And at our worst moments, we're not a good place to make good decisions for ourselves. And we don't want to be punished, but sometimes it is an act of love.
00:54:00 · Becky Kennedy
And I tell this to people very explicitly when they're like, "I know my teenager needs to go to therapy, but they're refusing." And I'll give them an exact script, "Here's what you're going to say." And it's some version of, "Look, I am going to drive you every Thursday to therapy. Whatever you do in the room, whether you lie, whether you're silent, that's not on me. But my Number One job is making decisions that I think are good for you even if you're not happy. That's how much I care about you. And this is one of those times." Every parent who told me they'd done that, their kids on some level, they're like, "I needed that." And I think the equivalent in the workplace is, there are moments when things are really turbulent, when people are, they're saying different things because they're anxious, and they're looking for a leader to kind of say, "Hey, I've heard this all. Here's what I'm doing." You might even say, "I'm not going to lie to you. Do I have complete conviction that this is right? No. But I've put it all together, and this is what we're going with, and I feel good about this direction. We'll reassess in a month. Let's go do this, team." And I think everyone is waiting in certain moments for someone to show up that way.
00:55:12 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:12] S0: That was an awesome story. It makes me think about it, just people, they will take what they can get, and they'll be wondering like, "Hey, wow, I'm getting away with all this." When will they realize that someone working at a company where they're not working that hard, "I'll just get away with this as long as I can until they tell me that I can't."
00:55:30 · Becky Kennedy
[00:55:30] S1: Yeah. And I just saw the show on Broadway called Punch. It's this really interesting story about this guy, true story that it's based on, where essentially he ended up punching someone at a bar, the guy falls and dies, but he ends up getting to know that person's parents after incarceration. And one of the things that comes up, because I think we tell ourselves, people will take advantage, they'll take all the space you give them. I do tend to think about it in a more of an MGI way, where what happened in this show is, these parents, this guy killed their son. And the question they come to him with, because they end up meeting is, "Well, tell us what you're going to do with your life here. What are you going to do with your life now?" And he ends up saying, nobody had ever asked me that question. Nobody had believed in me. Nobody had ever believed I could do anything useful. Changed the course of his life. It's a crazy story. But I think about at work when someone, yeah, whatever it is we think they're getting away with, or kids, sometimes I think kids are asking, "Is there an adult here? Is there an adult here who will help me, who sees that this is my form of acting out and being out of control? And will somebody help me?" And you know why kids act out more? It's not because they're taking advantage of you. It's because they feel that much more dysregulated because they don't feel like there's an adult in the room who's willing to put a container on their shell-less egg to help them come back together and move forward in a better direction.
00:57:06 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:06] S0: I think about just people that don't have parents that are there and always seek someone as their partner that's more, I don't know, that gives them that later. This connects really well with this idea of building resilience long-term versus short-term. And I think about in the work environment, doing the hard thing, you will be better off versus just letting things progress because it's hard for them to do. You think people will not want to hear bad news. Talk about just that kind of lesson and how that might translate.
00:57:30 · Becky Kennedy
[00:57:30] S1: One of the chapters in my book and something that guides our whole parenting philosophy is just codified as resilience over happiness. And I don't know if you hear this, Lenny, but I used to hear this all the time and I couldn't let myself let this small talk moment go. "Don't you just want your kid to be happy? You just want your kid to be happy, right?" And I'd always ruin a perfectly harmless comment. I was like, "No. And then again, we think in extremes, "Oh, you want your kid to be unhappy?" "No, I definitely don't want my kid to be unhappy." But I think if we zoom out, especially in childhood that I think I can make a parallel to work, too, optimizing for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood. Hard stop. Because in a kid's early years, what they're really learning is, "What range of experiences am I able to cope with? In how many different situations can I find my capability? Can I feel like I can get something done? Can I get through something? Or do I believe that the only way to feel like myself is to bring every form of discomfort to a zero and only find happiness?" The irony is, in adulthood, the thing that clouds out happiness often is our inability to manage disappointment, jealousy. Those things will always overpower happiness. And so happiness actually comes in adulthood from our ability to manage the widest range of difficult situations. That's what resilience is. It's our ability to handle the widest range of experiences. I'm not talking about toxic, but just disappointment, jealousy, anger, feeling less than. These are just human experiences we have. And unintentionally, something's happened over the generations where we're optimizing for kids' happiness. Our kids will say something like, "I'm the only one in my class who can't read," and we hop in with, "Oh, that's not true," or, "But you're so good at soccer, but you play chess, but you're doing this," as if I can't even tolerate my kids' upset feelings. And I tell parents all the time, our kids can only learn to tolerate the feelings we tolerate in them.