What is a Good Life? #75
Knowing Your Worth with Michael Bungay Stanier
On the 75th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael is best known for his book The Coaching Habit, which has sold over a million copies. His most recent book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, shows how to create psychological safety by building the Best Possible Relationship with key people at work. He founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that has trained hundreds of thousands of managers to be more coach-like. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and recently won the coaching award from Thinkers50.
In this insightful conversation, Michael shares the origin and meaning of his big goal of infecting a billion people with the possibility virus and the significance of feeling deeply defeated by ever greater things. He notes the importance of sharing the spotlight with others, maintaining humility while knowing what we are good at, and amplifying that. Throughout this conversation, he highlights the inherent value and worth of us all as human beings and his desire to embolden people by making them more aware of this truth.
If you sense you are playing it too safe or are fearful of what potential failure may say about you or your value as a person, this conversation will offer perspectives, experiences, and anecdotes that may liberate you to live more of the life you are yearning for and that is much more possible than you think.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (55 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
Michael mentions a sense of paradox several times in this interview, which he feels he encountered more deeply when he delved into the realm of human behaviour and development. He encountered sentiments like “the devil is in the detail” and books like Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, realising he held both to be true.
There is something refreshing about how Michael can very clearly state his strengths and then acknowledge just as clearly what he is not good at, all the while maintaining a sense of worth for himself.
To me, there is a significance about the role of holding paradoxes in maintaining our sense of worth that I hadn’t really considered before this morning while attempting to write this reflection for the tenth time today.
Sometimes this just flows from my fingertips, and other times it takes iteration after iteration before I connect with what I want to say. Both paths often bear fruit in different kinds of ways.
Anyhow, the more we can hold multiple things that appear to be opposing tensions and views as truths, the more we can appreciate that one thing doesn’t cancel out the other. For example, I can wholeheartedly say that you and I are absolutely wonderful and that you and I have many flaws or quirks that may not be helpful to us.
No big deal. Welcome to being human.
I have noticed recently that people I know who rarely hold the tension of paradoxes and run to more binary outcomes of right or wrong, black or white, yes or no, often really struggle with acknowledging either a weakness in themselves or an observation they may not like. The feedback is not simply another wrinkle, nuance, or fascinating realisation about one element of their behaviour but a threat to their entire identity.
So if, for example, I point out a flaw in how you did something, which accounts for only a small part of the role you are fulfilling, I am met with a response or an energy to the effect of, “So you think I am now bad at this?” To which, if I am well acquainted with the person, I will usually (and warmly it must be said) laugh out loud at the suggestion, as it is not what I am pointing out in the slightest.
I sense that when we are unable to hold the wider paradoxes of life as well as the individual ones of our own personal experience, we end up cultivating considerable blind spots in rejecting any contradictory evidence and consequently in defending the borders of our identity. Often furrowing in stagnant grooves as we seek to hold onto something.
It is almost a sense of life and death, at least in terms of the identity that we are attempting to uphold.
However, the more paradoxes we can engage with, the more wholeness we can acknowledge in ourselves and in those around us. For example, your existence is in ways both insignificant and highly significant.
The fact that 200 billion trillion stars exist in the universe and 110 billion people are said to have walked this earth statistically makes you insignificant, while Chaos Theory suggests that infinitesimally small changes will have large impacts upon wider systems.
You may die soon and within a couple of generations be almost completely forgotten, yet the energy and love you brought to this world may ripple on eternally in some sense.
The more we see that the world isn’t anywhere as clear-cut as we think it is, the more grace we can afford ourselves in how we perceive and value ourselves.
We can move away from the nonsense that our flaws negate our greatness and that they both can’t coexist. You can fail at a project while you yourself do not become a failure.
When we can realise this last line in particular, you’d be shocked at how much the world can open up for you to experiment, play, and experience life once more.
In this conversation, Michael shares his sign-off for his emails, and I’ll second it for you today, no matter where you find yourself today, whether mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually:
“You are awesome and you are doing great.”
3. Full Episode - Knowing Your Worth with Michael Bungay Stanier - What is a Good Life? #75
Click here for Apple and Amazon
4. This week’s Questions
How much do the outcomes of your endeavours affect your inherent sense of self worth?
Instead of fixating on perceived flaws, what can you acknowledge to yourself that you are great at right now?
About Me
I am an artist based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, experiences I create to stimulate more meaningful group conversations and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.